GREEN & GOLD.

Today started as have most days over the last few weeks, sun shiny, bright and very hot. The kind of weather, sunflowers love! When I was last up here for the first few months of the year, I wrote about how flooded the local arable fields were and the desperation of farmers unable to get tractors onto muddy, sludgy waterlogged ground. How very different that all seems five months on. Now, almost desperate for rain, local farmers have been irrigating their fields. So luckily, the winter/spring weather has topped up the reservoirs and just as I write this post the rain has started again and it sounds loud on the window panes. The good news is that I don't have to water all the pots in the garden but elsewhere, no doubt the earth has been dry as a bone ... not good in this hot summer weather! The great watering can in the sky has almost so far, failed us until tonight.

When I took the mad mutt out for a late afternoon walk today, I was surprised at just how cracked and parched the arable land has become despite some brief periods of rain during the last few weeks, and yet I have witnessed the water sprayers on potato fields!
Everywhere I looked there has been that contrast between green and gold (hence the title for this post) all too soon the arable crops will be harvested in and ploughing for next years rotational crop will begin again, earlier on this year they were harvesting beet here.

The apple trees here are ripening fast,the first being the cider apple tree ... already sweet enough to eat. I wish I knew how to make cider! Yummy (home made) scrumptious! So ... as I look around at the landscape here all I can see is green and gold under ever changing skies. I can hear the rain on the window panes, a welcome sound after the long hot days of drought. During our late afternoon walk I witnessed fissure type cracks in the soil, not a good sign, hopefully tonight's rain will ease the current situation and the fields now dry will drink their fill. 

Yes, the last few cornfield poppies were still in bloom and it reminded me of those that I have lost when I served in the RAF and of course of my Dad who did his national service in the RNVR. I miss him so much. He loved my blog because it helped him to understand my life back in Wales, though (typical proof reader) he often emailed me regards spelling mistakes, for which I was grateful. I missed him lots today, he loved seeing my photographs on the computer when he was too ill to walk anywhere and it was my way of sharing the Fenland scenes that he loved so much.
So, these green and gold photo's are for Dad ... 

He had a heart of gold and also as a keen environmentalist he cared about the countryside. Something that he and my mother instilled in me from a very early age and for which I will be eternally grateful. I also miss my mother who would as an illustrator of fungi, have loved to have seen this on an old apple tree in the mini orchard here ...
a beautifully formed, almost perfectly formed bracket  fungus which I have as yet to try and identify. I'm not that good on my mycological knowledge and I miss her expertise.

 Much as I love Wales, it has been lovely to be up here in the summer months and to see the fenland under different skies, with arable fields ripening in the summer sunshine. Taking the dog out has given me a break from sorting out this place and I have loved hearing both Roe & Muntjac deer calling in the twilight as well as owls hunting in the dim glimmer of hot summer evenings. I have fallen in love with the Fenland landscape despite still yearning for the hill farming community that I have had to leave behind me, all be it temporarily. New days, new challenges and many, many happy memories! Let us wait and see what the future has in store, but here's to both my parents and the crazy pathing path we have travelled in our lifetimes. It has been interesting to be up here during the summer months to see the Fens in a different light and  to have made so many new friends.

Here's to the future, whatever path it leads me.