A brief round-up

Wimbledon takes priority over these two weeks of the year.  My Aunty Mary always used to say that once Wimbledon was over it was downhill all the way to Christmas!  Sorry about mentioning that word because it becomes all the more obvious that quite shortly, in September, John Lewis will be getting out the tree decorations, twinkling lights and tinsel again.  Oh dear.  I think I might start this post again.

So Wimbledon, half way through, has been pretty exciting and as I write Laura Robson is through to the quarter finals.  She looks like an impressive young lady to me, with all the right qualities for being a strong and successful player for the UK over the coming years.  

It's been a quiet week in between bouts of time spent in front of the tennis.  However here are a few images of my week.  

I have been enjoying the line of trees shown in the photograph below. They are on a new route I have been taking when driving into Edinburgh and I find the spacing between the little trees rather pleasing!

The dogs and I have been enjoying our beach walk at Belhaven.  It's a great place and excellent for beachcombing.  My pockets are always pebbles and shells I can't resist, and the collection of of driftwood in the garden is ever growing.

The family of greater spotted woodpeckers has been extremely busy this week.  I think there are two babies who are now the same size as their parents.  Here's one being fed by Papa.  They are constantly zooming around the garden between feeders, trees and often on the garden path, picking out the moss between the paving slabs to find grubs underneath.  

This morning I spent a couple of hours precariously perched on the north side of Traprain Law, studiously studying two small areas of grassland, as part of the survey team recording the effect of Exmoor ponies grazing on the Law.  

This might look like a rather uninteresting area of grass but within this quadrat there are a surprising number of plants and we poked and prodded this bit of ground for a good hour recording key bits of information!   It was a very steep site and there was a certain amount of grovelling around and grabbing on to tufts of grass to avoid a tumble down the hill, but it was good fun!

On the way home I took a progress shot of the potato field.  The plants have really filled out and stems now touch across the furrows.  The flowers have appeared too which means something is definitely going on underground!