Sunday 21 February 2010

Spawn

A day planting trees in the orchard, pruning older ones and cutting down overdeveloped willow - that is crowding out the orchids and purple moor grass in Moor Wood - as we steadily work on increasing the culm patch. The latter was incredibly hard work, the mud sucking at my wellies so that I needed all my strength to lift my feet as I dragged willow branches to the edges of the area we're clearing. At one point I sank up to the top of my wellies and had nothing to cling to to pull myself free. With a lot of toe wiggling, swearing and extraordinary wet sucking noises (made by the mud, not me) I freed myself.
In every ditch and puddle there are heaps of frog spawn. Do frogs get stuck in the mud?

2 comments:

Yorkshire Pudding said...

Urgh! What a disgusting picture! Surely there are more attractive things to photograph in rural Devon such as men in smocks with pitchforks muttering "Oi think the answer lies in the soil" and big-busted milkmaids bearing wooden yokes with cleverly balanced buckets.

Unknown said...

Never seen a frog in wellies stuck in mud......think their surface area is probably spread out a bit more so they don't suffer from this problem.

Gofarmer - get one step ahead for farmers and smallholders