A little extra bite

We've been getting close to the animals recently. Just around the corner from our allotment site is St Werburgh's City Farm. This is a great place to go for a bit of light relaxation, not least because the aptly named Farm pub around the corner on Hopetoun Road has a fantastic beer garden. So, the route goes a little like this: To the allotment to dig, weed and harvest. Then, go to the pub for beer and finally on to the farm to stare at the pigs or bleat at the goats. (Ignore the sheep - they're not exactly the most interactive of animals.)

I mentioned chickens in a previous post. Goats would be a serious upgrade on chickens. Feed in any old green stuff in the front, get cheese out of the back. Great. There are three kids and three adults at the farm at the moment. If only they knew that just around the corner from their grass paddock lay 110 plots of fine, fresh leeks, brassicas and other vegetable delights...
There are, of course, also piglets. Pigs entertain me because they're always so grumpy. If it's not "squeal squeal squeal how could you treat me so cruelly?" it's "grunt grunt grunt leave me alone I'm miserable".
Anyway, it's not only the farmyard animals I've been sharing quality time with recently. Yesterday morning I woke up like a shot at 5:30, probably because the air is so still and hot at the moment that we left the curtains to our broadly south facing window open overnight to improve the breeze. Unable to get back to sleep, I jumped out of bed, pulled on some shorts and a t-shirt and made for the allotment. I was hell-bent on getting that last bit of the annexe dug, ready for leek transpalnting this weekend.

Unfortunately, the allotment was absolutely marauding with Blandford Fly, many of which decided quite specifically to maraud around my bare unprotected legs. My shins are now a patchwork of large watery swellings and extremely itchy red bites.

Our site is pretty well known for Blandford fly. The Allotment uber Gaffer tells stories of people needing to go to hospital after getting bad reactions to the bites. I went to A&E last year after I got bitten on the lower arm while digging potatoes; by the end of the next day my lower arm had doubled in size and my lymph nodes were like bright red tracks running up through to my neck.

The only thing I don't understand is where they come from. A quick search on the web shows that they like to be around rivers (the Stour in Blandford, for example). We don't have a river nearby, but we do have some slightly stagnant water butts? They're also apparently most active in the middle of the day, whereas I've only ever been bitten around dawn and dusk. Maybe what we've got isn't true Blandford Fly but a Bristol variant. I don't know. All I know is it bites anything below about half a metre from the ground, it draws blood and at the moment it itches like crazy.