We are now in the busiest part of our shipping season, for although I ship bulbs year-round, this is the time of year when the dormant bulbs are shipped; Gladiolus, Oxalis, Lachenalia, Calochortus, Brodiaea and many others. My two young helpers have been taking the bulbs out of the pots, and most have been done, but the California natives are still ripening seed and will not be ready to remove from their pots for another couple of weeks.
The pace has definitely picked up, but I still enjoy my morning walk around the garden and the greenhouses. My single mature bulb of Boophone haemanthoides has fully opened, and now is in decline, and I anxiously inspect my other Amaryllid bulbs that are ten years old or older for emerging buds, but, so far, no luck.
Our day always ends with a training session with my dogs. I have a small field set up with all the necessary agility equipment. We went out to train yesterday evening around 6pm, and the dogs became very agitated, running up and down one of the fence lines. 
The next door field is a mess, weeds and grass that are chin high and a big pile of broken concrete awaiting disposal, so it has not been used for the horses for quite a while. I saw the ears of a doe out in the weeds, and she was acting strangely. She just kept staring at us instead of running away from the dogs, and she was only about fifteen feet away. I thought she might have a fawn hidden in the grasses, so I got the dogs and put them in the front garden, and went back, and looking over the fence saw the tiniest fawns I have ever seen lying in an area that was almost scraped bare of grass. My dogs weigh about 18lbs each, and these little fawns were about half their size. They weren't there the day before when we trained, so I knew they were less than a day old. The dogs got free, and came racing around the greenhouses, and chased the mother, so there were some tense moments until I caught them. They are well trained, and even came to me when I called, although they certainly didn't want to leave off something as exciting as chasing a deer. I locked them in the house and went back with my camera to get a picture or two. The mother came back, and I watched from an upstairs window with my binoculars. The fawns could hardly stand and kept falling over, and were so tiny they could barely reach to nurse, bumping into each other an knocking each other down. Now, I have complained bitterly about deer, since they have caused severe damage to the garden, but I was totally won over by these beautiful little babies. A storm moved in last night, and I worried all night about them out in the cold rain, but I suppose they know how to deal with such adversity. I hope by now the mother has moved them to a safer place, and my dogs today seem quite uninterested in that area.
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