What the heck is this???
Just look at what I found in the dog's bowl. Horrid isn't it? Not sure of the name of the thing but apparently eats all your plants. So this little sucker got tossed over the wall.
And on with ant saga......
The
Raid just keeps on getting them. I went back to check on one room in another property that had got ants sneaking in through a hole. I blasted them all with
Raid a couple of weeks ago and hoovered up the hundreds of dead black bodies. Yesterday I discover hundreds more apparently dead ants. Only when I started to hoover them up, all of a sudden the hoover packed in and when I opened it up, loads of nasty, live ants tumbled out. Guess they are very good at pretending to be dead and having a whirl around a vacuum cleaner brings them back to life. So another dose of
Raid for both room and hoover.
Ants - amazing creatures but very annoying
While ants are amazingly organised creatures, this level of organization can cause havock in the garden. The above photo was taken of a huge an colony on a tree branch in my garden. This
army got blasted with RAID ant killer as the little buggers kept eating my cucumber seedlings.
And I discovered a large mound of grass seed by an ants nest in one of my other properties. The ants had obviously spent many days collecting seeds and transporting them back to their nest. Unfortunately for them, I have since swept up all my
removed grass seed and placed back on the garden.
This year there seems a massive amount of ants around and there are ant holes everywhere you look in the ground.
Kotel & Jeravna
The other weekend we decided to head up Kotel way. We left Stara Zagora around 5pm and headed towards Sliven in search of the 'Blue Rocks' in the mountains behind. After a couple of hours we reached Karandila, an old communist resort area high in the mountains. There were several old and run down hostels but apart from some stunning views across the valley below, not much else to commend it. And the rocks were basely blue, more a silver grey, but then we did not go to the main formations as daylight was running short.
We headed on north up and over the mountain on a very windy road until we came over the other side and into the Kotel region. It was just getting dark when we reached Kotel. As it is known as a tourist destination due to the National Revival style wooden houses, we expected there to be any lovely traditional hotels to choose from. But not so....there were basically 2 - a more modern one in the centre and an older style one on the edge of the village. Only the more modern (and more expensive at 60 levs a night for a room) one had space and so we booked in there.
The next day we went to explore the village. There is a small old part with quite a few wooden cladded traditional houses and 2 or 3 museum houses. We visited one but to be honest when you have seen one, you have seen them all, so we headed to the Museum of Nature and Science, which houses a large collection of local and international 'stuffed' wildlife and was fairly interesting.
At around lunchtime we headed back in the Sliven direction but took a slight detour to see the old museum town of Jeravna. And this was worth seeing.
Nestled in the mountains it is very beautiful and nearly all the houses are off the traditional National Revival style. There are several traditional restaurants and many small guest houses. We spent a lovely few hours wandering around, visiting a museum house or two (famous Bulgarian writers/artists etc), had a lovely meal in the sun and then headed back over to Stara Zagora.
