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It was 31st October – Halloween! Trick or Treat and fancy dress, and of course games like bobbing for apples. And that gave Andrea an idea… She’d recently walked down the side of one of the fields at the farm, looking for brambles trailing in the water of the ditch because they snag sticks and other flotsam and cause surprising amounts of flooding. Whilst doing this she’d noticed hundreds and hundreds of crab apples floating in the water. Many of the trees edging this field are crab apples and the ripe fruit just drops into the water and gets washed downstream.
So, she reasoned, here was an opportunity to celebrate Halloween with some apple bobbing, and also to cut back any brambles that were in danger of causing flooding! A win-win situation – perfect! All she needed was a pair of waterproof jodhpurs (which she was already wearing), some neoprene socks (which she was also already wearing) a Rooster AquaFleece smock (which had just finished drying on the Aga) and a pair of the tallest Bullseye-Hood rubber waders that she could find. Oh, and a pair of sturdy leather gloves and some secateurs of course, because the brambles are very prickly…
Suitably attired she walked along the edge of the stream, her wader boots squelching in the muddy grass of the field; she watched the apples floating along in the beck whilst noting the brambles that she needed to remove. At the far end of the field she lowered herself thigh-deep into the flow and proceeded to work her way slowly downstream, snipping brambles and freeing snagged apples as she went.
The Bullseye-Hood waders were sized as Extra Tall and for the first 200 meters of the stream they did their job admirably. Being Andrea, however, meant that she had to keep pushing them – deeper and deeper – until she got that little ingress of cold water through the crotch-seam of her waterproof jodhpurs. This was followed by trickles down the inside legs of both waders and then that squelching sensation between her neoprene socks and the insides of the wader boots. At this point she threw caution to the wind and enjoyed getting completely soaked, albeit pleasantly slowly… 😊
As she snipped and tugged the brambles, with apples drifting past her and with the water up to the mid-buttock, she smiled to herself that she’d found a new way to celebrate Halloween.
With the ditch cleared she rounded the corner in the beck and waded deeper as she freed huge stashes of apples from the ferns along the banks. The water at the dam was just awash with floating fruit and as she got onto the bank to admire it, her young Malinois called ‘Radar’ came bounding-up.
If there’s one thing that Radar loves doing, it’s jumping into the dam after sticks, and so the play began. Radar amply demonstrated that he could jump at least twice as far as Andrea could, but they each landed with about the same sized splash! After lots of jumping, splashing and swimming, both Andrea and her dog clambered out and headed back to the house to dry off.
What a great way to celebrate Halloween!
