Seemingly endless summer

The sun has just kept on shining, shining, shining through the cloudless skies of recent days, weeks and months. As we write this, we find it is June already and having just had our 'half term Whitsun holiday', it really does feel like the endless summer of childhood memories. So when it breaks in the coming days, the slow emergence from lockdown will be a different experience and this might blend to be another memory of summers long past.

The sight of the swallows feeding on the wing, in brilliant blue skies, between the barn and an oak tree will be a fresh memory of this time. As will the circling pairs of buzzards, catching the many rising thermals and effortlessly rising in the distance. The blackbirds are particularly busy collecting worms and smashing snail shells against hose pipes in the garden. They have benefitted greatly from the badgers scrabbling holes dug looking for grubs in recent weeks. In other wildlife news, the cat caught a squirrel the other day. Not a hazy memory of delight, just an awful lot of noise and brief chaos before it escaped to the freedom of the hedgerow cover once again.

The wildflowers have bloomed and given a seasonal shift to the space around us.

Nettles, foxgloves, wild rose, honeysuckle and more and more and more. All blooming and scrambling in their patches of the farm and our gardens. It has been great to capture the glimpses of them emerging and unfurling and investigating exactly where and when they all emerge. They are all being quietly collated in our #plantoftheday. We can now look back and see how and if the seasonal weather variations effect their cycles in years to come.

There have been plans to build a dry wood store throughout this past winter, which was the wettest we've seen in years. All those Sundays spent the rain, gathering dead wood and piling it under tarpaulin's worked a treat, but the idea and need for something more solid and efficient has been brewing for a long while. Now that the wood is bone dry, it's finally been constructed. (well...we've made a start at least) So when the weather finally breaks and as the Autumn and Winter speed toward us, we'll have a dry store of fuel to heat and warm us in the woods.

More paperwork and research has been done and we are well on our way to the next bit of our journey. We have come to planning, common ground and strategy and the core central tenets of what it is to be a social enterprise. Something that is tricky to imagine and develop in a time where the physically social practice of working is not going on. But we've made progress and have ticked lots of things off the lists we've had and are very much looking forward to being back out working with others as soon as we can.