A Couple Of Surprises…

..On the allotment recently. The first was under some overgrown grass that I was making a half-hearted effort at clearing:

 

Disappointingly, not a snake but - almost as exciting - a slow-worm! There were two of them, but I only managed to get a shot of one on my mobile before they disappeared, hopefully to somewhere romantic where they could get on with creating lots of slug-eating babies. They’re a protected species and apparently fall prey to domestic cats so I will leave that corner uncleared for a bit (the excuse I have been looking for) and keep my fingers crossed for them.

The other welcome surprise:

  

I suppose I shouldn’t have been that surprised that these tulips were out, as I’d noticed the previous week that they were budding up nicely. But in my defence, they are called Maytime, which sort of implies… Well, not the middle of April anyway. For selling, they should really have been picked still closed to give them the maximum vase life. But there was no way I was going to waste them, and besides the customers would need to see how fantastically fluorescently pink they were. So, after a night packed tightly in tall buckets to keep them straight, they looked like this:

 

And now they’re all gone until next year. It’s heart-wrenching stuff, this flower selling!