And 'cooler' still

To follow on from my last post, having gone from the current high temperatures back to Spring's relative coolness, let's now plunge back into the Winter just passed.

It is true to say that I  have never experienced so much snow, nor so much cold, before. We had a very mild autumn - or as they call it here a Gypsy summer, циганско лято - and then a late arrival of the snow, so we weren't expecting the thermometer to read -28ºC in late January! What a first winter, especially with gappy ceilings and a draughty roof, but we sat it out.

Much to our neighbours' amusement I was out with the camera quite a few times taking pictures of the snow - well it is rather novel to me, I'm sure it'll wear off in the end. For your enjoyment here are a few.

Here's one of my favourites (above): we had a wee bit of rain in mid January, followed by a drop in temperatures to a more normal -12º or so. When I woke up in the morning I did have to blink a few times before I believed what I saw, and heard. EVERYTHING was surrounded by 2–3mm of ice and I mean everything.

There is a huge and very old walnut tree in front of our house, and that too was swathed in its ice blanket. As I was enjoying the sight, as it was just getting light, there was a gentle bit of breeze, and then there was an unnervingly audible, very curious and impossible to ignore 'song' from all the limbs and branches as the ice creaked as they flexed. It was very hair raising!

Later in the day the wind got up and I stayed well, well clear of that tree, and all the others - with that much weight up there and the travel those cracked and gnarled old branches were making it wasn't worth the risk. There's a sound I will never forget.

And that wasn't all, the following day was a wee bit milder too, so we ended up with everything covered by 2mm of ice plus some very pretty, pure white hoar frost. Above is the larger of our two mulberry trees. Thankfully mulberries are very late to go into leaf and bud in Spring so they were none the worse for this rough treatment. It remains to be seen if we'll get any mulberries this year but the clearing away of scrub from around them can only but help as they are wind pollinated.