hello apples my old friends

luckily the little trees aren't ours - we own the old and empty ones. Our trees, like us, need a rest this year, so we'll just be making juice and the rest are for the birds.....

the forest in the background has made plenty of work though - firewood is heaping up for the next 100 years. The unexpected need to fell a lot of tress wasn't quite in our time plan. Our neighbour has heroically dealt with masses of it while Mr Spitzi was totally out of action earlier this year and now himself is able to do physical work again (with me hovering behind telling him to be careful ;-) he's carrying on the massive task of getting all the useful wood out before the beetles eat it. If it wasn't for the fact that I know that we really had to fell these trees I'd start suspecting that he has some strange compulsion to surround our whole property with woodpiles and would get him sent off to the nearest psychiatric unit (something he wouldn't be totally against since discovering that they have tennis courts and other fun things there - I was more interested in the ceramic workshops and the chance to spend all day painting - if only one could do that without needing to be officially loopy...)