A drier and sunnier week, but the wind has turned to the north and we've had frosty nights - enough to freeze the pond and require scraping of the car windscreen. There's still some water about, particularly when it rains but also just run-off from the fields; it's got to go somewhere, and back into the waterlogged soil isn't an option at the moment. In the garden, the soil is a bit sticky but it never gets completely sodden. The winter sunshine isn't enough to dry it out, but it's welcome when it comes.
The weekend's work was a mixture of clearing up, some cutting back, a little weeding - and doing a job I'd been keeping for the back end of the year, splitting the two 'Autumn Joy' sedums. They hadn't been divided since they went in (a good many years ago), and were flagging. Now that their flowers are over, it's a good time to get at them. The one by the summer house had all sorts of weeds in its roots - ground elder, nettles, buttercup and more - so badly needed sorting out. Three offshoots have been planted out under the big ash tree, three in front of the honeysuckle and a few more potted up as spares or for the spring plant sale.
Sunday was a bumper bird-spotting day. Over breakfast, in addition to the usual sparrows, robin, blackbirds and pigeons we had a pair of chaffinches, the fieldfare, a male bullfinch, a wren and a treecreeper. The fieldfare was busy keeping the blackbirds off the remaining apples, and even chasing away a blue tit that got too close. The green woodpecker is still about, and on Saturday we had a dozen partridges hiding in the garden to stay out of the way of the shoot. Even more remarkably, yesterday's sunshine saw a dozen woodpigeons all together, quite amicably, enjoying the sun under the plum tree. We seem to have plenty of robins this winter, which is nice (unless you're a territorially-minded robin); one of them was very appreciative of my digging up of the sedums, where the freshly turned soil provided a feast for him.
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