What a fabulous week!

The weather warmed up suddenly last weekend and whilst it hasn't been sunny all the time, it's been great getting back into shorts and sandals again after a couple of weeks of cool gloomy weather. I do find myself becoming quite lazy on days like this - although many days were a pleasant kind of warmth as whilst the sun felt very hot, it was nice and cool and fresh in the shade, which was much more apparent than during the summer months. But hey, we never know when it will be the last of our warm weather for maybe six months, so lazing around is not so bad, is it? 

The only sad note this week was the departure of our swallows. It's inevitable but always seems a bit strange when I first notice they have gone as the skies seem so empty and so quiet.  But on the plus side, a little bit of warmth and the Painted Lady butterflies were back, along with many others. I've found some goodies this week, like this groovy caterpillar. It was curled up in one of the large plant saucers that I use as chicken feed bowls. Luckily for it, chickens are at times sensible and don't go near hairy caterpillars!

Sycamore Moth (Acronicta aceris) caterpillar all curled up.

Sycamore Moth (Acronicta aceris) caterpillar - I had to prod it gently with a leaf to
make it uncurl and I didn't see its face until I put it down into the grass.

On Tuesday I went to revisit my Butterfly Walk to collect the seeds of the Greater Burdock that I'd found so covered in butterflies earlier in the summer. There were not many wildflowers about and far fewer butterflies, but plenty of insects were feeding on the ripe blackberries, even though the berries were rather small and not very juicy, due to the dry soil where they are growing. (As an aside, my brother asked me if I remembered us throwing the dry sticky seed heads of Burdock at each other as children. No. Still don't remember this plant.)

Comma (Polygonia c-album), very well camouflaged with their wings closed up like this.

A Green Bottle fly, a female Fever Fly (Dilophus febrilis) and
a Rose Chafer beetle (Cetonia aurata) all feeding from the same blackberry.

And at home a Speckled Wood (Pararge aegeria)
feeding on my cultivated blackberries.

It was certainly a(nother!) week for butterflies as I spotted two completely new species in my garden! Both tiny, both 'blues' and I'm amazed that I even noticed them at all, as these tiny little things are so easy to miss in amongst the big showy butterflies that are flitting about on these Verbena flowers.

A male Brown Argus (Aricia agestis).

A male Long-tailed Blue (Lampides boeticus). These butterflies are
migratory and will likely have come up here from the south of France.

Here's one of my favourite hoverflies, the weirdly named and strange looking Heineken Hoverfly, which are abundant right now. Yes the Verbena bonariensis is still a hit with pollinating insects - that and the sedums have been the favourites of many this last week.

Heineken Hoverfly (Rhingia campestris) with its strange snout.

There seems to be some kind of pattern going on here with my cats terrorising my chickens and ducks! Bertie is being a naughty little boy and worrying the hens.

Bwark bwark!

And here are the sound effects in this 13 second video. I've only just figured out how to get them off my Canon camera and be able to view them on my computer (yeah I know but I just haven't a clue where computers are concerned and didn't have the right software installed) so don't expect me to be able to edit them yet. The last few seconds are unnecessary and I wonder if you can guess what happened?!

Some rotten insect bit my foot! lol :-)

I will leave you with yet more butterflies and and whether the forecasted rain ever arrives (so far no luck) I'm getting back into the kitchen for yet more preserving. I'm off to England the middle of next month and want to take jams and chutneys with me as gifts for family and friends!

How many Peacocks (Inachis io) can you fit on one Sedum plant?
Yes, the blur counts!

Oh, one last thing I discovered just this morning after I'd written all the rest. Really annoyingly I've just found two young Swallowtail caterpillars. These are the only ones I've seen other than the four that I raised, so I'm guessing these are the babies of my babies. It's annoying because I don't have time to get them to chrysalis stage before going away.... yet we're going nowhere next spring... so I could have overwintered them and had another chance to see an eclosion earlier next year. Damn!

This one had just had a moult, because its facial markings are very pale
(and I found the skin on the stem as well).

Well I'll just chat to them when I'm in the veg patch instead. :-)

Pre-autumn garden update

Ugh. It's cold, it's drizzly, it's 12C outside. This is officially the last day of summer, not the first day of autumn but you could have fooled me! Yesterday was a lovely sunny T-shirt weather day and tomorrow it's supposed to be 21C again. It's so cold in the house we have put the central heating on, but as downstairs has underfloor heating, that means it won't warm up until tomorrow, when we'll probably be too hot! For the moment I have escaped upstairs to my office where I have proper radiators that radiate heat the moment you turn the boiler on. Like real central heating should (can you tell I don't like underfloor central heating?)

Normally on the odd cool day or evening at this time of year we'd just light the woodburner, but that's out of action right now due to a swarm of honey bees deciding that our stainless steel conduit would be a great place to make a nest back in May - leading unfortunately to the pest controller having to come out and poison them (no other option). We've been waiting until around this time to get the chimney sweeps back again because we were advised that the wax would have to dry out over the summer. However, to add to our woes we now have hornets coming down the chimney and out into the living room! So the pest controller man will be coming back next week to check out what's going on as we can hardly risk a chimney sweep getting a faceful of hornets high up on our roof and falling off and breaking his neck!

I do seem to be attracting insects this year, both the wanted and the unwanted!

So, that out of the way I wanted to update a bit about the garden and what's been going on whilst I've been away in the land of caterpillar raising. That's all quiet for the moment, indoors at least. Plenty of them rampaging outside, which I'll come to in due course.

The garden is looking very autumnal - much too much so for September. This is mostly due to the (usual) drought situation and many trees dropping their leaves due to stress. We've been crunching through crispy leaves for the last month. There's barely been any rain in 2 months now and only 2 rainfalls worth noting, and even they have only given about 3 days of respite before the watering cans, hosepipes and seep hoses have had to come out again. It gets very, very tiring and I start to get very disenchanted with the whole business of trying to garden.

Right, time to get on with some photos and enough of the waffling, Mandy!

Looking up through the Silver Birch leaves a few weeks ago

Poor Dogwood in the woodland that I'd forgotten to check on.
It has since been watered a number of times and is looking happier!

I had had a bright idea back in the spring to make a small bit of my woodland edge into a more cultivated kind of woodland garden, but really it's just not worth it for the extra watering involved, and the hose doesn't reach this far. I'll plant some bluebells here as bulbs will be fine.

My Cercis Canadensis 'Forest Pansy' looking lovely.
This is kept as well watered as possible as I only planted it a year ago.

Looking a bit crispy round the edges! Some trees are already bare such as my Rowan
(out of the picture)

My beautiful Liquidambar going the same way as last year -
no likelihood of any glorious autumn colours as the leaves just
crisp up and drop off

Pond level is down about 2.5 feet (75cms) and is looking a bit green and murky.
This is no big deal as usually it's a lot lower level than this by now, so I'm happy with this!

I mentioned rampaging caterpillars earlier on - look at this. My poor gooseberries have been totally decimated by gooseberry sawfly larvae! These are tiny little green caterpillary looking things. Two days beforehand the bushes were fine. The two little bushes were only planted out this spring from cuttings I took last year, so I hope that this late in the season it won't have any adverse effect on them. Honestly, how vigilant can you be in the garden? You can't check everything, every day.

Bit hard to show these bare stems against the scruffy
wild background and chicken run fence behind.

Here's another example of caterpillar attack that just suddenly happened within a few days - this time the insect responsible is one of the Ermine moths which attacks Sedums called Yponomeuta sedella. I've never experienced this one before - we normally see Spindle Ermine Moth damage on our spindleberry out in the woodland but that's big enough to withstand an attack and it's a wild tree sized shrub which copes fine. I've also seen the webby 'nests' of caterpillars on our apples from time to time but never in huge amounts.

If you look closely (click on the photo to enlarge) you'll see the caterpillars in amongst
the webs they make throughout the plant. They seem to love the purple foliaged
Sedum telephium best and this damage is spreading like wildfire all around my garden.

Before you think I've gone all doom and gloom on you, don't worry. I have been quite chilled about all this as I've been enjoying the sunshine and butterflies! But now I'm trying to get my act together to do my usual autumn jobs of moving plants around - because no matter how many years you garden, there's always something that didn't work where you planted it, not to mention the plants that need dividing because they have outgrown their space. In this instance here I am trying to rid myself of a ghastly day lily which came with the house - I've never liked it and after flowering it just looks a mess. I have a new shrub to go here and a much lovelier scented yellow flowered day lily in a bed that's become too shady, so I plan to move some of that here too.

Veggie patch in the background with sunny Sunflowers and Calendula!

However I don't do things by half. Digging out day lily roots which have gone down over 1 foot into the subsoil and bedrock is like some archaelogical excavation. It took me 2.5 afternoons of work as I just know that any fleshy bits of root will come back as a plant, eventually. 

Removing soil, subsoil, rocks, roots....
and adding tons and tons of half rotted compost in the bottom
before filling back with soil again.

To be honest I will never get these garden jobs finished as everything takes so long! You can see how dry the soil is yet I thought this was a bed I'd kept well watered!!! Can you imagine how dry the rest of the garden is?

I have treated myself to two new shrubs as well, a blue Caryopteris which I've always fancied to go in the space I've just excavated, and I wanted something yellow for another bed so chose this Potentilla. Both plants were covered in bees, hoverflies and butterflies at the garden centre, so even if they are not absolutely drought tolerant shrubs I couldn't help myself.......

The Potentilla at home with a Small Blue butterfly on it!

This is what the last few weeks have been like in the garden.
Some days I can barely move for butterflies!
(There's a Hummingbird Hawkmoth at the top middle as well)

My sunflower heads have been attracting Goldfinches, both adults and juveniles so I have been enjoying hearing their twittering coming from the veg patch as I work. I also spotted them eating the seedheads in my weedy, scruffy lawn this morning - one of the reasons for leaving the Lesser Hawkbit to go to seed, which has seeds like a dandelion head. This has almost made up for the fact that our Swallows have gone. We are still seeing migrating Swallows passing by and stopping to have a swoop about over the garden but it's not the same as them being here all the time. When they first go the skies seem so empty and quiet, but the good thing is that we know they will be back!

Naff photo taken with my Cybershot - there's an adult and two juveniles in this shot.
I can't be out gardening with a big camera and telephoto lens in my pocket!

In other news one of our older hens had to be put down yesterday as she'd gone all wobbly on her legs and could barely walk; this is now the third hen this has happened to so I'm guessing it's all too common in old age. She was not one of my favourites, being totally neurotic and was never a good layer whose eggs were always brittle (and often crushed by my big Light Sussex hen!). Her laying days were over and it sounds a bit callous but it's a good thing as that's one less mouth to feed which is not repaying us with eggs.

To end on an upbeat note, the solitary moorhen who made a reappearance some weeks back has now been joined by another - so hopefully we'll have a pair again who will delight us with their presence and cross fingers will breed here next year rather than disappearing off to pastures new like they did this summer!

Next posting will be recipes and sweet veggie cakes as I've been baking cakes (and eating them......) :-)

Veg patch 2nd June

I keep on taking photos and never getting round to posting them, and then everything's gone and grown again! Right, so here are some pics of the veg patch taken during the last week!

First one is an overview, this was taken a couple of days ago as I'd just thinned out the lettuce. For Mr (Annony) Mouse who was asking about my wildflower bed - it's the strip in this first bed marked with pegs (you may have to click on the photo and look on your giant mac screen). I sowed the seed in diagonal lines so I could tell what was a wildflower rather than my usual weeds. It should be interesting as it's a mix especially for pollinators. This by the way is the space that would have been sweetcorn but I decided not to grow any this year as it's so hit and miss (explanation here).

Overview May 31st

I forgot I'd taken another photo of it! By the way the space above on the right (and below top right) is the frame for my cucumbers for when they are finally big enough to plant out! I grow them upwards which they do very well so they don't take up too much ground space.

'Wildflower meadow'

Spuds taken about a week ago, but I wanted a photo after earthing them up, when there were no weeds, so everyone would think what a neat and tidy gardener I am! The first two rows on the left are Belle de Fontenay which is a lovely early potato and the other smaller ones are Desiree, a red maincrop which stores really well. We were still eating last year's until about a month ago.

Beautiful weed free rows of spuds

Next one was taken about a week ago as the kale and PSB are still in place. My peas are flowering away merrily but I'm still waiting for the mange tout to start flowering and getting very impatient.

Sure enough blackfly has appeared on the broad beans but there are at least 4 red ladybirds and one of those tiny yellow and black ones on the plants. I have put down two saucers of old strawberry jam in the hope of enticing the ants to take more interest in that than protecting their aphids (blackfly), which they farm for the honeydew that the aphids secrete. If the ants are off the plants then the ladybirds can get in for the kill. That's the theory anyway; one year it worked and another I had a swarm of honeybees eating the jam so quickly I kept having to give them more!

Pea flowers, with broad beans in foreground

The peas are starting to swell up now and I have three successive sowings. I don't even really like peas very much, except raw! I am such a lovely wife, I am growing them for my OH, who adores them.

A pea pod

Just another view of peas, strawbs and spuds. My OH put a small bench in the veg patch for me so I can just sit and survey my domain! It's a bit hot sitting here though and there are stinging nettles right behind coming through the fence from the field!

Back of house from the potager

Little Gem lettuce which I sowed early into a pot protected in a cold frame then pricked out and later planted into this funny plasticky cold frame from Lidl. I'm so glad I did as this is miles ahead of the April sowing of various lettuces direct into the ground, so we have finally had our first harvest of something grown this year!

Little Gem lettuce

The best thing that's happening right now though are the strawberries. I have tons of Gariguette, which are an early non remontant variety. That means they only flower and fruit once. I also have a remontant called Charlotte (not to be confused with the spud of the same name!) which is incredibly sweet and that's already ripening up too and will continue to produce fruit until the autumn. I've just planted out a new row of Charlottes so between these two varieties I have 6 rows of strawbs! Maybe a bit OTT but they are on rotation and one row of Gariguette is on year 3 and will be taken out after fruiting.

Gariguette strawberries, netted against the birds

First strawberry harvest about a week ago. Since then they have gone bananas (haha) with the warm weather we've been having and last night I picked two plastic tubs worth and the fruit is bigger now. I guess I'll be making jam again (to feed to the ants!) and I really need to remember to get that darn ice cream maker bowl into the freezer!!!

YUM!

What I haven't bothered to show yet is the onion plot as it's got some pink Roscoff onions doing nicely in it and some very small leeks and spring onions, so not a lot to show really. I'm currently in the process of planting out my pathetically small chillies into the space where the winter brassicas were. Cross fingers they will start to grow now they are in the soil!

Swallows zooming over the veg patch and perching on the cane tops

One last piccy which won't win any awards but just to show another use for cane tops. I noticed the swallows as I was taking buggy pics so shot (that sounds so wrong!) them from afar with the macro lens, which effectively zooms in on them. One was perching on the tomato canes. I love these birds!