Spring at the Old Sheep Farm

Spring has come to Camarnaint! And what a beautiful Spring it is too. It hasn't rained properly for four weeks. Bright sunshine and blue skies seem to be the norm right now, which is very much not the situation we are used to. Its a welcome relief from the winter storms, where I could barely stand up in the wind, staggering between the car and the house carrying Willow in my arms, and it rained so much that we had to rig up a drainpipe inside.

The hellebores were first to raise their head above the parapet (beautiful, if slightly slug-munched, with a scrap of sheep wool tangled round them carried on the wind):

Then came the primroses, and the saxifrages:

And of course it wouldn't be Wales without the daffodils:

My little bulbs that I had planted in our new flowerbeds started to emerge (although I have forgotten what these lovely purple ones are!):

And now the gorse is flowering all over the hillsides, and we get wafts of that amazing coconut smell on the warm air.

The aubretia spilling out of the drystone walls are covered in little hover-bees (pretty sure that is not their name...!)

And this little chap peeks out at us from the wall outside our window...is he a mouse or a vole? Willow announced he was a vole, but as she is 18 months old, I am not confident of her rodent identification skills as yet.

And finally, our plum tree is blossoming! But if it is anything like last year, the wasps get to the plums way before we do...