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I wondered down in to the wood today and found my first crop of hazlenuts from the new trees. Very exciting!

We hd a farmy day today. First we fed the chickens before going around searching for eggs. Then we got the sheep feed ready for later. We loved watching the sheep coming running when they saw the red bucket

We had great fun hiding mythical monsters, today, and then challenging some grown ups to find them all. I have a feeling I will be finding monsters for the next two months.

I remember when swimming hats used to look a bit like this! The subtle shades of colour in these lichen really caught my eye. Lichens are a symbiotic relationship between a fungus and an alga. They are classified as crustose (crusty), foliose (leafy) or fruticose (shrubby). The slightly greener lichen in the middle could be a fruticose lichen called Dotted Ramalina or maybe Cladonia Perforata. The flatter one could be a Parmalia of some type – Saxatilis maybe. I really could do with some advice to help me develop my knowledge of these fascinating life forms which go largely unnoticed.

The chickens discovered the sugar beet we had left soaking for the sheep. The sheep can spot the red bucket from 200 metres so they stood in the field glaring whilst the 4 girls took their fill!

We are really beginning to think about risk management around the site now, so it was time to tackle a pile of glass still left in the remains of the greenhouse after it succumbed to a freak tornado,which swept down the hill, a few years ago. Removing the glass from the 20 metre radius of the greenhouse took me most of the next summer, but the glass in the greenhouse beds was swept in to a corner and quickly disappeared under a layer of weed. Nature conquers all, and in a few more years it would have become just another layer in the archaeological record of the garden. Time had already smoothed the sharp edges, which had made the job of tidying up so unpleasant the year it happened. But glass endures forever. Where will it eventually come to lie, and what will our descendants make of it in thousands of years from now?

I found this puffball, leathery and browned with age, under a pine tree in the spinney. I tapped it with my boot and it let out a cloud of spoors. Puff balls are edible, but I have always been a bit cautious about eating one after hearing that they can be confused with the Destroying Angel, a fungus whose deadly properties can be adequately deduced from its name.

I went out to let the chickens out, this morning, and was mesmerised by the pulsing, amber light which lit up the wood beyond the gate. The pheasant seemed to be basking in the view and I kept bumping in to him as I wandered through the pine grove to the west of the house.