From the garden to Christian Aid

 I am excited to report that the duck has indeed returned. Eggs were spotted on 26th April.

And by 1 May she was ensconced on the nest and I haven't managed to see how many eggs there are. Nikki has provided duck food and a water container for her.

Meanwhile, we've been enjoying some really lovely flower displays in church since committing to source all our flowers locally where possible and avoid floral foam:

We've put up a new bee hotel as the old one was not well used and we decided it was probably in too shady a place (but there were a couple of blocked holes, so I didn't like to move it). This has been a good talking point as well as being put to use very swiftly. So I've signed us up for the Big Bee Hotel Experiment.

The wildflower patch has a great variety in it, albeit not all that colourful yet. I added some of the seed bombs left over from a recent Forest Church session, and some of the children buried a few in pots around the courtyard, so we're looking forward to seeing what comes of those.

And I was chuffed to find froghoppers have been by, creating cuckoo spit (apologies for the blurry image).

Meanwhile the main border has been drawing lots of bees and dragonflies.

And the marigolds I planted too late last year started flowering very early this year and are still going. Since taking this photo, I've been able to inter-plant them with tomato plants, courtesy of Reading's Carmelite community.

This number of bikes is pretty common on Sunday mornings and there were even more for the APCM.

Finally Christian Aid week has been very busy - members of our congregation were up early at the station on several mornings collecting from commuters; 

there was the sponsored walk through glorious countryside at Bix (organised by Richard and Rosemary) and three of the younger members of the congregation have committed to walking 70K in May. Our church lunch this month was in aid of Christian Aid too.