I won a badge! Today, with much relief, I achieved a significant milestone. I was awarded a badge for successfully completing Wordle on 150 consecutive days. For anyone that is not familiar with it Wordle is an online daily word game in which you have to guess a 5 letter word in fewer than 6 attempts. Statistics are kept on your running streak of successful completed games, along with a bar chart showing a historical record of how many attempts it has taken a player to complete the puzzle. There is jeopardy, because if you forget to do the puzzle one day you lose your winning streak. I am rather more fixated on the stats than is healthy I think. For goodness sake it’s only a daft word game! But the monkey on my shoulder whispers in my ear “the numbers are what matter, don’t fall for the ‘it’s only a game’ nonsense, you will loathe yourself if you lose your streak”. My next target? 250 wins in a row….gulp.

There was some welcome rain last week, which might get my cover crop seeds moving. There were two days in which the rain guage was called into action, and the cumulative amount measured was 16mm, which isn’t at all bad. Of course it’s not enough to get the water courses running, but sufficient to fill some water butts.

I set up my trailcam in the orchard again last week to see what was going on overnight. There was plenty of activity featuring all of the main cast – deer, rabbits, fox, Muntjac, and of course Brock the badger, that lovely sweet woodland creature that bimbles about in such an endearing manner. Yeah right! This morning I discovered the result of our lovable mustelid’s overnight forays. It had gained access to the polytunnel and dug up quite a number of lettuce plants. What made it worse was that it wasn’t interested in a midnight salad, it just uprooted them while it dug in the soil searching for earthworms. Because I water the beds in the tunnel the earth is nice and easy to dig, so you have to admire its intellect, but as I said earlier, in the last few days there has been 16mm of rain, so it wouldn’t have hurt it to have had a dig outside. My concern now is that because it has done it once it might repeat its actions and dig up the whole bed. I have put lettuces in the shop this week, but if it wreaks havoc in the coming nights you may find that they might disappear.

I picked more apples on Monday and Tuesday and took a van-full to be pressed for juice. While I was picking fruit I came across our old friend D’Arcy stretched out under an apple tree. It allowed me to get within a couple of metres of it where I observed it laying on its side whilst casually munching on a piece of apple. Upon finishing its afternoon snack the hare rolled over and rubbed its head and neck into the soil, very like the way that our hens dust bathe. It really didn’t object at all to me being in such close proximity to it.

I cleared a bed in the greenhouse last week and replanted it with chard. Tomorrow sees the start of the big tomato plant clearance in the glasshouse. Those plants have just about ceased to bear fruit so they are no longer worth their place in there. It’s a dirty old job, and by the end of the day I will probably resemble a chimney sweep.

This week there will be cooking apples in the shop, and dessert ones will be Natyra, a variety known for its crisp texture, and a complex sweet-sour flavour. There are some small Verdelli lemons with a reduced price, and a small number of new season oranges from Spain. I have only ordered one 10kg box this week because I want to see what they are like before committing to larger volumes. On the veg front there is little change, but kale is one addition. The perpetual spinach is currently in good shape, and the parsnips are tastier than expected given that we haven’t had a frost yet to sweeten them up.

Please remember to get your orders placed by Tuesday night. Recently some of you have been getting lax, and I don’t want to have to speak severely with you!

Okay that’s me outta here. Have a good week. It’s almost time to dig out the hot water bottle and hope that the rubber hasn’t perished. Keep a lookout for those Northern Lights – I missed them last night.

Phil