5th May – We’ve enjoyed a spell of glorious weather here and it looks set to continue for a while longer. The sun has nicely caught these tulips in the front border.
It’s just a great shame that, due to lockdown, there is no-one here to enjoy it all.
We’ve been taking advantage of the nice weather to create a vegetable patch from recycled plastic boxes. Mostly old fish boxes. we’ve planted a selection including lettuce, carrots, beetroot, leeks, spinach, chard, turnip, onions and spring onions.
8th May – The glorious weather continues, ideal for seals to find a shallow spot and soak up some rays.
The forecast is that a cold front is moving south, so this might be the last chance to to do this for a while.
9th May – The weather has completely changed now. We are having our first rain for a couple of weeks and it’s brought the snails out en masse. Spent a damp morning bagging and binning them. Spent a damp afternoon earthing up the spuds and protecting the vegetable seedlings from the predicted cold snap tonight.
The wet weather is keeping us mainly indoors, so H has made some lemon curd.
It’s a messy business funnelling it into jars but well worth it…it’s delicious.
11th May – With the pandemic resulting in zero visitors to Orkney, the poet Edwin Muir caught the right note in this excerpt from “The Northern Islands”.
12th May – Well, after some three weeks of beautiful spring weather, we woke to this!
This is known as “lambing snow” and seems to arrive every year when the lambs are just born. It’s the heaviest snow we’ve had this winter. It won’t lie at low level as the ground is quite wet but the hills are white.
20th May – Stromness featured in the BBC’s “Scotland’s Home of the Year” programme this evening. This week they covered Orkney and Shetland, with a tiny cottage in Stromness winning this heat. The programme used some nice drone footage of the Stromness area with Well Park clearly visible. I pinched this pic from the programme.
This shows the Graemsay ferry entering the harbour with Well Park arrowed. It’s only when you see these aerial shots that you realise how narrow the Stromness peninsula is.
21st May – This would have been the first day of the Orkney Folk Festival but, for obvious reasons, it has been cancelled. Here is a sampler from last year’s event. Staged at venues throughout the Islands, it really brings in the crowds. A real shame that all the various halls are silent this year.
29th May – It’s the first day of the relaxed lockdown and good to see the golfers are back out on the course.
The golf course is in great condition, There’s been no-one hacking divots out of it for over two months and the grounds staff have been maintaining it throughout.
Scapa Views 
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