The Sun has got his hat on and he's coming out today

The sun paid us a visit this weekend. He only stayed until lunchtime both days but there was certainly enough sunshine to get us all out and about. Saturday was spent working on the cottage garden, bouncing on the trampoline and reading the newspaper.





Sunday was a day for starting the vegetable patch planting, walking on the beach and walking in the country lanes. 'Mooching' as my Dad would say.

We went to the southern end of Vazon Bay for our beach walk today. We have walked the northern end quite a few times but only ever driven past its southern reaches.

The most common seashells you find on Guernsey beaches are limpets, periwinkles and snails. I am well versed in the seashells of Guernsey as we have a growing collection of them in various bottles around the house. The snails sound as if they would be something quite common but they are actually very beautiful en masse as they come in a vast range of surprising colours. I will get organised and take a suitably arty photo titled 'The Glamour of the Guernsey Gastropod.'

The rare and exotic Sea Duck.

As you can see Vazon is a rather large bay. The sand is not the 'sugar' sand you get on a lot of Australian beaches but it still makes might fine sandcastles.

As we were coming down the slipway to get onto the beach there was a man with a truck loading up the tray with seaweed, or vraic (pronounced rake) as the Guerns call it. I stopped to ask him what he was going to do with the enormous pile of smelly stuff. Apparently you can place it straight on your garden beds or bury it and it does wonders for the soil, although September is the best time to use it. Now I like our neighbours, and we have a friendly relationship with them, so I think we will go and collect some seaweed in September, just as people are starting to use their gardens less. We will go for the burying option over the direct mulching method to reduce the wafting aroma which would no doubt follow, but we will definitely give it a go.

My daughter's favourite seaweed; it will no doubt have some magical connection to the Mer-people of the English Channel.

Reclaiming the dunes.

After our beach walk we headed into the 'countryside' of Castel parish. I say 'countryside' in inverted commas as nowhere is very far on Guernsey and there are really not many places on the Island where you can not see a house or two. As we were driving down one of the lanes my husband brought the car to an abrupt halt, reversed and pulled into a divet in the hedge, in a rather James Bond being chased by the bad guy fashion I might add. He had spied a Greenlane, a pathway designated solely for the use of pedestrians, and decided we should all don our coats once more and head off down the lane to discover where it lead.

It was a lovely muddy pathway (so of course it was popular with the gumboot clad members of our party) in between a few farms. Horses, chickens, daffodils, seagulls (which are ever present) and geese were our companions on our adventure amble. You could see the Reservoir in the distance.

We came across a group of these fine fellows in a spectacular daffodil field. I think they were left to fend for themselves rather than giving them the chop. There are no foxes in Guernsey so I suppose all they would need to watch out for is the odd dog.

I could not get any closer to these geese to get a better photo. I have had experiences with their hissing, honking and 'toothy' bills before so I think we shall admire their more picturesque quality from afar.

I hope your weekend was a lovely one.