Progress

 I can't believe we are a week in to April already. How did that happen? 

I missed showing the progress on these steps:

They have been like this for a few days. There's still more to do, but they will definitely make it easier to get through this part of the garden once the wet weather starts. The bluestone pitchers are these ones.

When I came home from work yesterday, one of the "temporary" kitchen lights had been replaced. 

Then today a second

and then a third were installed:

I bought these pendant lights a couple of months ago, and it is lovely to have them out of their boxes and hanging from the ceiling now. The cardboard ones from Ikea did the job (for 5.5 years) but I think these ones look a lot better.

I've been working on my WOOFA unfinished project for April, Trail Mix:

So far I have only stitched in the ditch between the blocks, but it is progress.

Late today a couple of ducks joined the menagerie:

The two on the left are the new ones. They are like clones of each other, so we will never tell them apart. They teamed up with the old ducks to form a flock quite quickly. None of the "pecking order" conflict you see with chooks.

As I was waiting for the ducks to get close enough to photograph, I noticed some little eyes looking at me from the crabapple tree:

It is a tiny Ewing's tree frog!

Surprises

The ducks seem to have have stopped laying recently, but when I let them out this morning there were a couple of eggs visible in their straw nest. I opened up that part of their hutch, and discovered that there weren't just two eggs, there were quite a few more hidden in the straw:

Five were turned into scrambled eggs and eaten for breakfast before I thought to photograph the collection. Twenty-one eggs! Those sneaky ducks.

A couple of days ago I said that one variety of dahlia had appeared, but I'd forgotten to note which ones I planted where. Well I know which they are now, as today the other variety is appearing, and it has purple leaves:

That means these ones are Mystic Sparkler, and the first ones to appear were the unnamed orange one that wasn't meant to be orange.

A New Low

Minus 4 this morning!

Frost:

Looks quite pretty on some plants:

But the bergenia looks like cooked spinach:

The daylilies don't look happy:

Red hot pokers are not looking too hot:

And there's ice on the duck pond:

Temperature Scale

At a sit and sew day today I started stitching the temperature scale for my year quilt:

And then surprised myself by getting the whole thing stitched. So when I got home I sewed it into the quilt:

I'm a beginner at embroidery. I was feeling a bit discouraged by my wonky stitching, but I think it looks good enough from a distance.

Linked to Sarah's weekly weather report for old time's sake!

Also when I got home I discovered we had a different duck:

Apparently one of the original ducks turned out to be a drake, so he's been swapped out for the little black duck in the background. Sorry about the bad photo, but it gets dark early these days. This was about 4:40 and it was already too dark to take a photo without the flash.

Ducks

When I arrived home last night I discovered that the population of domestic creatures had grown:

Last weekend our 10-yr-old chook died, which was rather sad. But now we have 3 ducks to replace her. Nett increase in the creature count: 2.

Another unexpected arrival:

A spring star flower open before winter even starts!