Leaden

Outlook yesterday. It's been like this all week. Click to enbiggen.

A Vegetable Garden

'A vegetable garden in the beginning looks so promising and then after all little by little grows nothing but vegetables, nothing but vegetables.'
Gertrude Stein

Bzzz

Yesterday I took the stethoscope back to the hive and had a listen and happily there was a lot of buzzuzzing from within. So the cold weather hasn't finished the bees off. And today I saw a bumblebee out and about.


And coincidentally Mike @ Articles & Texticles just sent me this picture of an early beekeeper's hat from RadioGuy's collection. It wouldn't look out of place at the Steampunk exhibition at the Museum of the History of Science that we saw today on an outing to Oxford. (Sydney Padua, who also runs the Natural History of Shelbourne blog created the poster for the exhibit featuring her Babbage & Lovelace comic strip.)

Snoo Again

Twas in the month of December,
In the year of eighteen eighty-two,
The railway lines near Pevensey Bay
Were buried under the snoo.
All thro' the night the blizzard fiend
Did like a lion roar,
The snow rose up from inches three,
To inches three foot four.

William J. MacGoonagal Poet & Tragedian

Potato Fair

Two weeks to go until the Seedy Sunday Potato Fair in south east London!

Brrr

Hens don't want to leave the house (nor do I) and we must break the ice on their water bowl every morning. But finally, the first egg since early November.
*Gilbert White's entry January 13th 1776
Poultry do not stir-out of the hen-houses: they are amazed, & confounded in snow, & would soon perish.