Granny and Emily were looking out of the window and Emily saw a bird. It was very big. It landed next to the pond. It was a heron. Granny had never seen a heron in her garden before. Then it flew away. 

picture fromrspb bird-and-wildlife-guides
Next we watched a blackbird having a bath in the pond. It splashed and splashed.

A soggy afternoon

Granny and Tom tried to clean out the pond today.

We raked out some grass, leaves, moss, green slime, and Tom pulled out some roots of the reed mace. No-one planted the reed-mace, it just came by itself - one plant at first but now it is all round the pond.

Tom pulled some of the furry seed heads off and looked at all the seeds inside. He sprinkled them on the pond, so there might be even more next year. Some people call them bullrushes.

Granny managed to stay dry - until Tom needed help pulling off his boots and emptying the water out, then got splashed.. But we couldn't finish the job - Granny's wellies were not tall enough

3 pheasants

We saw three pheasants in the garden.Two had  white collars.

                                                                                                                                                                          Like this one Photo: Jim Urbach/Audubon Photography Awards

                               http://www.audubon.org/news/ring-necked-pheasant-strutting-its-stuff                                                                                                                                                                             

The other had no white and it's wing was less speckled

                   https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/pheasant-195973.jpg                                         

we picked plums ,strawberries ,brambles and we ate some . We needed some peas for tea.  tom saw a dragon fly that was yellow and brown. Maybe it was a Black-tailed Skimmer female .    

we were picking bad greengages today we found 5 bad ones and 40 ripe ones.

 tom tasted one and it was nice, because it was juicy.

There were lots of butterflies on the sunny Buddleia plants. 4 Peacocks, 3 Red Admirals, lots of Cabbage Whites and 2 SpeckledWoods.
Tom helped finish digging up the potatoes, and picking plums. We found some ripe plums and took the bad ones off the trees. Granny used the step-ladder, but Tom climbed the tree.

We were picking plums today and Tom found a ripe czar plum and they ate it.