We are just back from a MoHo trip and about to go off on another one, so really making the most of this wonderfully dismal weather! This June was certainly not flaming, more like a damp squib. On the plus side, no watering of the garden and the grass is still nice and green.
Summing up June when we were at home - newly fledged birds figured high this month. Something I noticed in May, which was confirmed by a snippet I heard on Springwatch on the TV about the failure of caterpillars this year, something that happens about once every 12 years. I'd thought that there must have been a lack of the usual little green caterpillars that the Tits (particularly Blue Tits) feed to their young. Now, normally there is a period where the Tits seem to disappear, and hardly any birds visit the feeders. One fatball can last a week or more. This is during the period of the caterpillar and the raising of the young. But this year that quiet period never happened and we have been feeding the birds left right and centre these last two months. During June all the parents showed their newly fledged kids where the free meals were, and we have been going through fatballs and peanuts ever since at a rate of knots. This too is unusual as usually the newly fledged birds leave the feeders after a few days of getting acquainted with the free meals, presumably preferring to eat more natural food elsewhere. So all the more reason to feed our garden birds all year round.
A young Blue Tit, just fledged, sits on the windowsill wondering where to go next.
"It looks nice in there".
I saved this just fledged wren from Hallie - it was an amazing sight as suddenly two little birds flew low over the veg patch and Hallie leapt into the air and caught this bird! Thank god I was there and was able to get it from her unharmed. I put the little bird in the hedge at the bottom of the garden (there were cats everywhere and no good vegetation around where I found it). I then felt guilty as Mama Wren was calling for her babies and I'd put it in a different place. Well, what can you do?!
Mama Wren calling (damn that fence wire!).
The home made feeder is looking a bit the worse for wear now - sometimes it has about 10 juvenile Tits on it, not to mention baby Great Spotted Woodpecker who visits often, plus other adult birds.
Another young Blue Tit.
And in other news - what's this hideous photo for? Well I had a tooth out. I really didn't think I'd be posting this in public but I am!! And why am I wearing a fur stole? Well it's Bertie and me trying to take selfies together. :-) OK forget the smiley face, I am in the early stages of having a bridge done involving four teeth (one now out) and two root canals..... ugh. :-( It really doesn't help that I can only understand about 30% of what my dentist says, so I have no idea why I need root canals. She's the only French person who I've ever come across who doesn't understand anything I say either!! I just have to hope for the best here.
I found a Bee Beetle (Trichius fasciatus)! I don't see these guys very often and they are so funky.
This Cinnabar moth (Tyria jacobaeae) was in the chicken shed - I thought it was dead as it was lying on the ground unmoving and then did a good impression of being dead on my hand too. Luckily for it, it started to move so I put it on this Clematis, 'The President", and it came back to life.
June marked the return of the blue damselflies, several species being spotted, though I've only seen one dragonfly here flying around the pond, and only on a few sunny warm days.
Blue-tailed Damselfly (Ischnura elegans)
Butterflies have been very thin on the ground, with a few brave Painted Ladies and the return of our stalwarts, the Meadow Brown, usually flying low over the lawn.
Plants are loving the damper conditions and the veg patch continues to look stunning (so long as you don't look closer at the more weedy wildflowers!). This is mid month when the Opium poppies were in full bloom and the foxgloves too. Now it's more great spires of Verbascum and Verbena bonariensis giving height. This photo is probably best clicked on to view full screen.
I left a couple of parsnips in to flower as I hadn't ever seen their blooms - I remembered that they were yellow as some years back Cleve West used them in a Chelsea design. Actually they are more stunning than I thought - quite similar to dill but a lot more chunky. Insects like them too.
Phone photo of some bugs on the parsnip flowers: Crab Spider, Red Soldier Beetle and Thick Thighed Flower Beetle.
I also left some carrots in the ground and they are flowering too - really I shouldn't be surprised that cultivated carrots look very much like..... wild carrot flowers! I found a crab spider on one of them too.
Over the garden gate - Opium poppies and our native red poppy. A lot of the white flowers here are coriander gone to seed.
Opium poppies up close - they are very photogenic.
New Heuchera bed after a weed. The little fence is working for keeping the chickens off!
Sheltering from the rain in the potting shed.
Towards the end of the month we discovered this Alder tree fallen in the lake. There is a stand of them two-thirds of the way up the pond and one of them's roots interspersed with soil stuck out into the pond a little way, like a little island. Over the years though when the water level has gone down, the tree's rootball has been tunnelled under by muskrats and probably coypu, leaving it weakened, and we have been waiting for this to happen. One smaller tree fell a few years ago, but this one has taken the rootball with it and none of it is exactly accessible. I'm not sure what will happen with this tree, but for now there's a nice Kingfisher perch which I hope will be used.
One last picture - I've had the moth trap out a few times and whilst I haven't had as much variety as I had expected for this time of year, I did bag a beautiful Elephant Hawkmoth one night.
Let's hope for some warmer weather in July, and a few more butterflies!
Hi everyone, I am back from my two week holiday in England. I've had a wonderful time staying with my mum in Somerset and have had some great days out. Lots of photos to share from a few of these trips but first I needed to record my jungle garden before the mower got in there! The photos don't really do the long grass justice, nor the amount of flowerheads from the tall yellow flowered plant - think it's called Hawkbit and it is everywhere in the lawn.
We arrived home on Thursday morning and in the afternoon we duly got out there to start the grand tidy up, only for it to pour with rain soon after we got outside! K ended up doing the orchard with the hand mower as long wet grass is too much for the ride on mower. Yesterday he did more mowing with the hand mower and even that struggled with the wet grass. I'm fed up with removing cleavers from my flower beds, whose seeds unfortunately have got into my compost. Even the chickens have had enough of them. I have a LOT of work to do out here!
This really amazed me - I haven't seen Horse Chestnuts self seeding before! I'm not sure how their conkers got pushed into the soil, or maybe the seeds just open up and root whilst sitting in the grass thatch and moss.
Looking towards what was once a pristine veggie patch.
The path down to the pond.
Really I was most enamoured by my mess of a veg patch which is now very colourful and really buzzing with bees, enjoying the Borage and the Phacelia which has opened up whilst we've been away. I'm always happy to see wild Poppies and it won't be long before the masses of Opium Poppies flower too. I have had to weed kill the paths though as it was getting really hard to get around in there. There are still a few strawberries but it's yet another job I never got around to, but I'm planning to root some runners and start again in a new place later this year.
Veggies! I've never left parsnips or carrots to seed before, so it will be fun to see their flowers. The parsnips are the tall plants on the right near the top, with the carrots bottom left. Currants in the background which have been tended to.
In the background here where the white flowers are is my original Pollinator Meadow and the white flowers are Dame's Rocket - another plant which is brilliant for both bees and butterflies.
First Striped Shieldbug (Graphosoma lineatum) I've seen this year but I later noticed there are dozens of them eating my Bronze Fennel and causing some damage to the foliage. The Bronze Fennel is popular as the last two days there has been a Swallowtail butterfly flitting about it, hopefully it's a female laying eggs!
I haven't been able to capture the bees very well as I really need to use my dslr and macro lens - think I'll get that out of the cupboard and see how I get on with it again. But my newish bridge camera is not bad for zooming in on them. You can click on any of these photos to view them larger - most look better that way with more detail showing.
A Small Heath (Coenonympha pamphilus) butterfly resting on a Verbascum leaf.
This is a phone photo - typical that I spotted this Holly Blue (Celastrina argiolus) just as my camera battery died - but I had the phone as back up!
Somehow the only decent Nora Barlow mix Aquilegia that I grew from seed managed to self seed on entirely the other side of the house!
These are a few phone photos I took on 11th May just before leaving - I had intended to show them to my Mum, but forgot! So to my brother, please show her all these pics.
These are the two Ivy Leafed Geraniums which survived the winter!
Mini Health Update
I'm glad to say that I did not have a moment of depression whilst in England, nor, and far more importantly, since I got home. The fact that I found joy in my own garden again and got excited enough to take the photos of the grass and veg patch, and start to look at the insects again and enjoy the buzzing of the bees attests to that. I've also managed to sit without any donut cushions in many coffee shops and restaurants around Somerset and Devon..... well I wasn't bloody well carrying them around with me all day when out and about! :-)
Buggy things first as there are not too many of them at this time of year. My OH brought this in for me to have a look at. He found it on an old plastic chopping board which was out in the barn around his work bench. I don't know who might have made it, but I'm guessing a solitary wasp? Any ideas? It's about 2cm wide, and I was very pleased that my new toy made a good show of photographing it.....
Yup I've joined the 21st century and changed my ancient but very cute clamshell mobile phone, which was from before the days of even cameras on phones, for a smartphone! Talk about shock to the system. Now I don't use mobiles much at all, and my real reason for wanting one was so that I could take snaps of things whilst out and about (not that I go out and about very much) and upload instantly to social media. Or take photos of the cats looking cute and share on facebook without having to get up off the sofa. And I was feeling really left out that I could not join Instagram just because I didn't have a smartphone. I still don't think that's fair, even though it seems like all the world and his dog have smartphones already, so there's nobody else but me feeling left out.
What was great about the deal I got was that it only cost me about €17 because we had so many supermarket fidelity points saved, that cashed in came to €150! So I don't feel guilty now for spending on something which isn't totally necessary.
I hadn't been in the mood for taking photos lately but I had to try this phone camera out, didn't I? It's so hard to use though - it has a fair few semi manual settings which can be used (it stays on f2.2) but it's hard to do all that with your finger when you are not used to it. And to tap on the screen to take the photo whilst trying to hold it steady, and point at the thing you want to shoot, and keep it in focus - my god, how do you guys do it? The image stabilisation must be great in this camera as it did a good job I reckon, as I was waving it about all over the place! I have edited some of these photos a little bit but mostly crops, contrast etc. It's not bad for an 8MP camera. Oh and I discovered quite by accident that it even has a zoom. Good grief, modern technology is amazing!
Here you can see where I've been attacking the ivy at the base of the trees, and a black cat wanting to be in the picture.
I was really surprised to see the Mirabelle plums already blooming a couple of weeks ago!! They are normally in blossom mid to late February.
I'm still in hack, slash and burn mode in the garden. I'm not out of the woods yet (hoho) and I don't have much desire to do many of the garden jobs that need doing, but I am happily going out in the afternoons, in most weather, to attack brambles and ivy. I'm sure a therapist would have a field day with that, but it all needs doing anyway and it's better than staying indoors doing nothing. I tried taking a photo of them both, plus whippy saplings, but they don't show up much. This is just the other side of the 'beach' area of the pond but you can't see it from here, because of the undergrowth.
I am enjoying liberating tree bark, however if it is not covered in ivy it is covered in lichen! :-)
Guess what's finally finished flowering? Yup those nasturtiums are going into the compost bins now - yet the calendula and borage are still alive, albeit the frost killed off their flowers. The plant that surprised me though is feverfew, as it doesn't seem to have been phased by the frosts at all and the flowers don't look any different.
Also wanting to flower in the jungle is a self seeded PSB! That'll be eaten soon.
I had to show you Keith's carrots. Because he is a bit heavy handed when sowing seeds (well he has big hands) and they didn't get thinned much, they have come out all sizes as they were growing so close together. It makes it more fun when digging them up though. There is a bit of root fly damage now but not too much.
Up against the house wall here is the new heuchera bed which was all I had the energy to deal with in the autumn. It's the bit with all the snowdrops in it. We pruned back the huge old yucca and I dug out tons of weeds and replanted loads of snowdrops and some early narcissus bulbs in betweeen the new heucheras. Two of the heucheras have even sent up flower stems which is just more of the odd weather craziness! Piles of snow dumped on parts of the USA whilst Rennes airport recorded almost 17C/62.6F the other day. Mad. But I'll take this over the snow.
The other bed is a work in progress as it had been taken over by creeping things, both weeds and 'real' plants. I have a couple of new purple heucheras to go in there along with other things which will be replanted.
The hedge guy has been and I wonder if he noticed my asparagus bed..... luckily there are none shooting yet, because it certainly needs some tlc.
Harry wanted to help...
Just a pic to show how the ivy has spread even up the house end of the garden.
Oh and Bertie wanted to have his pic taken (he didn't really, he was busy grooming himself, but I got lucky and snapped at just the right moment when he looked up as I called him).
There is no hope for me now! :-)
If any of you are on Instagram you can find me there, follow me and I'll follow you back, although I've only posted two photos so far, so my home page or whatever you call it doesn't look very interesting. Yet.....
https://www.instagram.com/chateaumoorhen/
