Ice with that?

It looks like the mini-Ice Age is coming to an end here in our corner of Wales. Which is a bit of a shame. I've really enjoyed finally having lots of birds at the feeders and seeing blue skies after what seems like months of grey.

But the best of it all has been frozen, iron-hard ground where there has been welly-deep mud. The garden has been bad enough, but the field we keep our ponies in has been terrible.

It's mostly river floodplain and has been like a quagmire since October. The freeze has given me the chance to get around repairing fences and tidying up without sinking in to mud that's the consistency of porridge. Now the rain is coming back I suppose treacle-wading will be the order of the day once again and the wellies will have to come back out of the shed.