Tornadoes in USA & Swallows are here!

Quite a blustery morning here but with an 11.9c temperature at 0600 I don't suppose we are getting it too bad! Its Tornado season in the USA and the Telegraph carries an interesting story of one professional storm chaser with a vehicle looking like something out of a movie.

We sat in the garden yesterday in the early morning sunshine having a cup of tea.  One topic of conversation was the fact we had not seen any Swifts Martins or Swallows this year.  Right on cue though a swallow made a pass just to the north of the garden obviously looking for food.  Lets hope the bugs get the message with the warm weather we are having!

I noticed on the front page of one paper yesterday a picture of a number of pink sheep.  Searching for follow up i picked up this story in the Daily Mail  It was someones idea to dye some sheep pink in a New Zealand nature park.  The stunt was connected to "breast cancer awareness week" but the public liked them so much they are staying pink for the time being.  An Interesting fact though is revealed that sheep are almost colour blind so they wont mind!  How do they know sheep are colour blind?

I changed the background and banner pics on our weather website yesterday from its winter to spring mantle.  While searching for relevant pics in our archive I was startled to see a marked difference in the garden pics of March 2012 to 2013

    Here's a pic of the garden 31/3/2013 showing snow on the roof 's of the structures in the foreground and very little colour in the garden.  Note in particular the absence of any colour behind the greenhouse on the right

Heres a pic of the garden 30/3/2012 taken from "snow covered roof on the left of the upper pic" The daffodils are out in force (which is just behind the greenhouse) as is the white blossom on the miniature cherry tree(centre right).  The tree (hawthorn) above the trellis, top left clearly has new leaves on it while even now (14 April) they are nowhere to be seen yet. 

Our fish pond is well and truly "alive" now and we noted a slight green Algae bloom the other day.  I set to in an attempt to change the UV bulb in the filter box.  The idea of the UV light is to make the Algae stick together which then helps the filter foams collect it rather than returning it to the pond because they are too small individually to be caught by the foam. 
It soon became apparent why we were having the power outages in February caused by the UV system.  The ageing filter had been leaking water into the UV light compartment and shorting out the power. 
Looking on the internet it turns out that a new UV unit is almost as expensive as buying a new filter box.  We decided therefore to "upgrade" our filter system and buy one of these pressurised "easy clean" systems.  It should arrive soon and will be pressed into service immediately!

Finally - - - Its that time of year again to stock up the woodshed, and weather permitting today we will add another load once we have cut it, up at our logging site in the local hills. 

Enjoy the day

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