I was having breakfast in the Kitchen the other day when my friend the Buck came sprinting past the kitchen window at 8.30 in the morning.  He continued out towards the field, disappearing from sight. A short time later the clank of a metal ladder outside the door and a knock on it told me that Dean the window cleaner was here which explained the speedy exit of  'himself' the  Buck, into the fields. As Dean was brought up in the village and is a friend of the family time was spent exchanging the usual pleasantries before he went on his way. I had a look for the Buck but he had disappeared into the water meadows.

While we are on the subject of deer a number of people have commented that they have seen large deer crossing the road typically the size of a large pony. This sounds like the Red Deer that is normally seen in pictures of Scotland. It stands some five feet high at its shoulders and if you then imagine a neck and head, with a good set of antlers on top you will have some idea of the size of this animal. The last time I saw any around Elstead was in the early 1950s. If the sightings are Red Deer they may well have escaped from a wild life area. As they can easily clear a six-foot fence the owner will be hard pressed to keep them in.

Corn Harvesting, The Modern Way Part 2
Last month I covered it all! You store your corn in a silo and apart from making sure it stayed dry by blowing air through it.

By this time in the old days it had been put into corn ricks and still had to be threshed before you could use the grain. 

As it Was Part 2
We dealt with cutting and gathering the corn last month but before it can be used it has to be separated from the stalk. Threshing out a rick was labour intensive it needing a man on the corn rick to pass the sheaves to the man on top of the thresher  cutting the string of the sheaves before feeding the unthreshed corn into the machine; one to remove the sacks of grain to the granary from the other end of the thresher; one to pitch the straw bundles that came out of yet another part of the machine to the straw rick and two on the straw rick to build it.

The whole operation would take the six men a day to complete. The thresher was hired from Wellers farm at Amberley in Milford and with any luck would arrive by late afternoon and put in place beside the corn rick ready for the next day. The thresher was about twenty feet long, five feet wide and some fifteen feet high with a collection of flat pulleys, some with canvas belts on, sticking out at various points of the device. This lot was towed along the road by Mr Wellers 'Field Marshal' tractor which was also used at site for powering the thresher.

More Creepy Crawlies in the Garden - Ladybirds.
On a sunny day in October I found dozens of Ladybirds on a warm wall of the house (facing southeast) . these were very active flying around and then moving up and down the warm bricks. Although many were the common red beetles; some were black and yellow. There are about forty different kinds of Ladybird living in this country, the seven spot being the most commonest.

During the autumn they gather together to start looking for crevices to hibernate in, clusters of them my be found crammed together under bark or beneath windowsills.

These little creatures are a boon to the gardeners as they eat many aphids as do their larva. Each female lays about  two hundred eggs often on the underside of leaves close to the aphids. These turn into slate blue larva with yellow blotches ½ inch long (13 mm) and they look nothing like the adults, being longer. After three weeks they turn into the pupa stage before turning at last into the familiar Ladybird that we know.