Royal Wedding Day

We've spent a fair amount of today in front of the television, apart from my weekly trip to the market this morning and the normal rounds of animal feeding, watering etc. The kids went off to school this morning and are at a party in town right now to celebrate Gorna Oryahovitsa's holiday so it's been really peaceful here, although I have to go and pick them up soon. We've channel hopped between the royal wedding and the semi finals of the world championship snooker. So it's congratulations to the happy couple and I'm hoping that Judd Trump gets into the snooker final!

Hubby injured a rib or 2 over a week ago and is still in pain so should be taking things easy at the moment. He's not enjoying the enforced rest I must add and keeps trying to do small jobs even though he's in pain. Hopefully he'll start to feel a bit better soon and things can get back to normal here.The neighbours have offered their advise and told me I should be massaging his back every day to help the healing.

Yesterday I managed to get the shopping done, paid some bills and also the car insurance. The weather was wet so it wasn't a wasted gardening day. I also did a good deed for a neighbour and found one of his pigeons that has escaped, caught it in hubby's fishing net and took it home for them, job well done and an extra round of coffees this morning in the cafe by way of thanks :)

Temperatures are still quite low for the time of year so my vegetables, with the exception of the garlic, aren't doing wonderfully. But there is plenty of time for things to catch up luckily. At least the grass is growing well which means the horses and donkey are stuffing themselves every day and coming in at night happy and full.

We're hoping to leave one of the paddocks for a hay crop this year to help cut down on our winter feed costs. I must admit that feeding the animals here costs a lot less than the UK but only if we buy at the right time of year and in bulk, plus of course it's all dependant on the weather. If the hay crop gets ruined then everyone else is having the same problem too.

Ticks??? Yowl

Most of the animals are settled at the moment and it's lovely to see them enjoying themselves. The cats and dogs are spending much more time outside, but we have to check them every day as there are a lot of ticks around at this time of year. The cats seem to be affected the worst and daily come home with at least one tick attached, despite having flea and tick drops put on less than a month ago. I'm not keen on putting collars on cats in case they get stuck somewhere so will just have to keep up the tick watch and remove any I find. we find hat Kiltix collars work very well for the dogs and also keeping the 2 Spaniels coats short makes it easier to spot anything that shouldn't be there.

What have you been up to today? Did you get to watch the wedding?

Spring Photo's

As the weather is a bit cooler today I'm indoors and have some free time to post the long promised spring photgraphs of things around the garden. I'm still experimenting with the camera but do like the photo's I take so I guess that's what counts :)

I have a few small experiments going on in the garden this year too with one or 2 of the raised beds, lots of old straw bales and copious amounts of well aged compost. The neighbours still shake their heads and think I'm mad but at least they laugh about it now and occasionally agree that some of my methods do actually work. Mind you it's just occasionally, the rest of the time they just can't make their minds up about what I'm doing at all. It's fun to keep them guessing though :)

The daffodils and snowdrops are all finished now but there are signs of life in the flower garden again, small seedlings are popping up everywhere and the peony roses are getting taller daily. Some of the seedlings may well turn out to be weeds but it's a waiting game at the moment. My vegetable seedlings are still indoors as the nighttime temperatures haven't been great here, they are rising but slowly so hopefully in a couple of weeks everything else can go into it's final place in the garden.

And finally a lovley photo of some of the local girls (and my daughter) in tradtional Bulgarian costume, going round the village singing and dancing for Lazaren day. They had a great time and came home with loads of sweets, some money and 2 dozen eggs each!