This week we celebrate the start of the Chinese New Year (Lunar New Year) and this time around it’s symbolised by the dragon.

In the Chinese culture, the dragon represents good luck, strength, health and also the male element Yang. The dragon is unique because it’s the only mythical creature of all the animals in the Chinese zodiac.

Another little nugget of knowledge – back in the very olden days, there was only ten months in the calendar. Winter was considered a non-event so was written-off and the year started in March. The Romans invented the Julian Calendar in 46 BC, adding January and February, and was used for 1,600 years before the Gregorian Calendar replaced it and added the Leap Year to stop the calendar drifting out of sequence with the seasons.

Thank me later when you win the pub quiz…

We started today at the recycled picnic bench and tackled the tree that had narrowly missed completely crushing it.

I don’t know how we managed to move the whole thing, or rather, how David managed to keep going at it and get it moved, but we did it and it will make a perfect home for a huge amount of bugs and insects over many many summers.

After a quick slurp of coffee and a biscuit or two, we carried on south-bound just creating little areas that will get a decent blast of sunlight in the summer.

If you are wondering why we want the path to be wide and sunshine hitting the ground, just wait until spring when the path is green and full of wildflowers, bees and butterflies.

Our YouTube of the bit that we worked on today.

It will be interesting to look back on these when it has greened up in a couple of months.

In other news, we had a lad called Max do his Duke of Edinburgh with us in 2022. His task was to take the bits from a smashed up picnic bench, salvage what he could, and make something. He made three dainty little benches that did very well until the mob of angry squirrels smashed two of them to bits.

I put my recycling head on and made a new bench out of the two smashed up benches. So the thing started as a picnic bench in someone’s garden, they gave it to us and we refurbed it, it got smashed up and Max made three benches out of the salvageable bits, and now it’s on its fourth incarnation.

It’s just somewhere to rest your weary legs and enjoy a bit of green-time.

Possibly a joke about Trigger’s broom in there somewhere, but, yeah, we love recycling.

And whilst I am rattling on about recycling, we swapped over a woodpecker ravaged front of a bird-box, and banged the old bit through our woodworking workshop, and replaced a box front that met a similar fate close to Berrybanks.

It’s rough and ready, but I’m pretty sure the birds wouldn’t want it any other way.

Next week we are putting in a bench made by Andrew (thank you) with our DofE lads. More humping bags of postfix, but it will be worth it. And then just two more weeks until the bird nesting season starts.

We also litter-picked from where we started, south-bound, so our end-users can enjoy the path to the maximum.

Lastly, at the start of each month I’m going to do a little round-up of last month’s blogging stats. I love looking at numbers, statistics, number patterns and sequences, and I’m sure there are other similarly geeky people out there who maybe like the same.

We had 48 countries tuning in, these being (by number of visits) United Kingdom, United States, India, Canada, Kenya, Pakistan, Spain, South Africa, Australia, Brazil, Germany, Philippines, Israel, Ireland, Oman, France, New Zealand, Mexico, Malta, Egypt, Romania, Indonesia, North Macedonia, Switzerland, Greece, Zimbabwe, Italy, Uganda, Portugal, Denmark, Nepal, Belgium, Qatar, Lesotho, United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Trinidad and Tobago, Ukraine, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Japan, Mongolia, Latvia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia.

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And with that, I’m off to order some sweet and sour chicken balls and a portion of spicy fried rice to celebrate the Chinese New Year! Or is it a bit early??

Until next time!