> Frank Lindsay sent Xmas greetings to the list and said
> "Good morning. It’s nearly seven AM in New Zealand.  The sky is bright
> blue with hardly a cloud in the sky. A very light southerly breeze is
> ruffling ....."
> Ditto here in Western Australia,/guidelines.htm

Thank you both so much for that!  Here it has been pouring with rain for
most of the so-called summer and it has continued right through until now.

The rain here is hammering down, temperature has risen to a balmy 5C and
everything is totally saturated.  There are floods everywhere and I passed
around ten abandoned cars on the 2 mile drive to our local town yesterday (I
took the Land Rover of course).

Soil is washing off the fields and the lane down to the village is just a
river of mud.  A number of apiary sites are unreachable even with the Land
Rover - in fact a tractor would be at risk.  Local farmers have abandoned
crops of potatoes as machinery just gets bogged down.  So many fields were
not planted this autumn and many have not even been ploughed.  Some crops
that were planted and started to grow (e.g. rape) have been washed away.

If we get a wet spring I suspect that many will be bankrupted.

Merry Christmas!

Best wishes to all

Peter
52.144442, -1.503509

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