The back yard on a sunny January day

This is a follow-up to my post yesterday about the cyclamens that come up and flower in our back yard in January and February. We've been having a spell of dry, sunny weather, but that's about to end now. There are only five photos in this slideshow.

The logs in the photo above are what remains of a couple of diseased apple trees that we had to have cut down last year. In the first photo of the show, you can see the west-facing side of our house with the greenhouse we had built a few years ago.We've also put in all new windows since we moved here in 2003; the ones you see on the back of the house had to be put in back in 2004, to replace the old wooden ones which were neither air- nor water-tight.

The next photo shows the garden shed. It's a masonry structure on a concrete pad. IWe had a new door put on it in 2004 and now it needs new shutters. We keep the lawnmower, rototiller, some wheelbarrows, and other odds and ends out there. There's no electricity or heat in the shed.

Then there's a shot of the yard where you can see not only my long shadow but also the vegetable garden plot, part of which is covered with a big tarp. There's kale growing in the garden now. And there's a hazelnut hedge behind the garden plot. The woods behind that hedge are not part of the half-acre of land that we own and live on.

The last two photos show the pond that's out beyond our back hedge. It is owned by the commune (the village authorities). As Walt showed recently on his blog, the temporary construction site has now been cleared of equipment. The green box embedded in our hedge is an electrical transformer that was put in when our power lines were undergrounded a few years ago.

This morning I've been looking at some photos of the house and yard that I took in 2002, the first time we saw the place. I'm going to try, time and motivation allowing, to post some before and after photos of our place in France over the coming days and weeks.