The end of Nov and the start of winter?

November was quite a good month although we had a fair amount of rain, it was mild with some lovely warm sunny days. However this all changed on the 28th, when we arrived home from lugo to find a snow plough parked up at our turn off from the motor way.Spain is very good at being prepared for snow, so we guessed that we had it on the way, later that night the lights went out, and all we had was a few old candle stubs, so we did the practical thing and went to bed. the next day we awoke to six inches of snow, and still no power. We had talked about getting a generator, but this had been put on the long finger. We attempted to drive up to the moterway, which we knew would be clear but had to abandon that idea, come the afternoon the snow stopped and it did start to thaw so we thought the we might be able to get out if we went down to our village, the onto the motorway, this we managed and got ourselfs to Lugo, bought a generator, and home we went. The power was off for the best part of two days, but now we have a generator we will not be caught out again, although none of the locals seem to mind having no electricty, we like our creature comforts.

Last of the summer crops and flowers.

Autumn is now here, and the trees are showing some lovely colours, we have had about four days of rain, but now the weather is dry but chilly but very warm in the sun. We have picked what will be our last courgettes and the last of the strawberry's today, we have been cropping both since May, I'm still trying to find time to plant more strawberry's in the new tunnel so we might get early ones next year.

As I'm working downstairs painting all the new ceiling boards I've had the fire on, this woke up a beautiful Peacock Butterfly, we will have to find it and find more suitable accommodation for it.

We haven't seen many Salamanders this year and were worried that our lovely cats had been feasting on them, however we found on the other evening making it's way to it winter quarters.

I'm not sure what happened to Oct, I know it came, but it also went very quickly, our last helper Chris did a great job harvesting the maize and then hanging it up in the big barn, and we hope we have enough for all our livestock for the winter months. We also had a start made on the fruit tree pruning, we only found out during the last week that Chris was with us that he knew how to prune, just wish we had known before.

We now are at the stage of one step forward and two steps back! When Simon cut a hole to get the new hot water tank into the attic he found that many of the old ceiling boards needed replacing, so the new water system is now on hold while we replace the last ceiling, all the others have been done, my part in this is painting all the new boards, a job I hate, and again the work on the garden is on hold. Still most of our veg have done very well this year, and we have even had a yellow carrot! all from the same packet, and Organic seed, I guess it was the one that got away.