More of the same

While out on her ride, Angie met Farmer Blank from the village. Apart from his passion for his "Braunvieh" cows, he also has the village tank station, milk tank station that is, open 8:00am to  8:00pm. Not only that he has a couple of horses/ponies. Angie asked him if he had some hay left over from last year as we now only have haylage left and it's a bit dangerous to open a bale in this hot weather and with the horses now on the fields, 24 hours a day. Particularly as the grass is so fresh, they need the "roughage" from the hay. He luckily has some and said he would pop over.

Sure enough a couple of hours later he arrived with a bale. Interestingly we were able to have a quick chat - yesterday being VE day, he told me that at least two SS soldiers were buried about 20 meters from the house! He's younger than me but remembers from his childhood the wooden crosses and said the forest around the house had seen the last resistance against the American troopsin the area. Normally there would not be anything to fight over here but the airport at Memmingen is just a few kilometers away and was bombed until 23rd April 1945 before the town surrendered on 26th April.

The airport had amongst other things been used in the development of the "Amerika Bomber", a plan to bomb America from flights started in Germany. Anyway Farmer Blank also said lots of ammunition was abandoned in the forest, he himself had found two machine guns and said that during the clean up operations after the massive "Wiebke" storm on 1st March 1990, the forestry machines were plaqued by masses of metal that surfaced with the toppled trees.

The graves or at least crosses have long rotted and noone knows where they are.

Meanwhile I got on with tackling more Thuja and driving away trailer loads of cuttings to the recycling dump. Angie was busy with filling pots, tubs and hanging baskets. MrB visited for a coffee, chat and to collect his beekeeping bits I bought yesterday. farmer Franz came by with some plants dug out of their garden by his wife and also with a sack of Rye straw. I didn't hear what he thought we should do with it perhaps as a filler, mixed in with the hay. Germany is the worlds largest rye producer. It has a much lower gluten level than wheat and of course is used in "pumpernickel" bread.