Tales from the pond bank

I've probably lured you in under false pretences; a more suitable title would be 'lack of life around the pond'! One thing I can say for sure - it's still full! I'm very happy about this, but I have come to realise that I actually see far more of what is going on when the level drops and I can see the rocky and muddy sides of the pond and under the overhanging trees.

Some proper blue sky would be nice so I didn't have this glare when taking photos!

I was hoping to swamp you all with pictures of baby moorhens by now, but the moorhens cleared off a while back after two failed nest attempts. I think they've gone up the stream as occasional 'mips' can be heard coming from that direction. I really hope they've been able to breed but wouldn't have thought they would have much protection against predators - plenty of thick bramble cover against flying predators but no deep water to swim off to against mammal attack.

Even the mallards seem to have stopped coming by and I haven't even seen a heron for a while! Never mind, Kenny the Kingfisher is still around occasionally. No muskrats here since 2010 (good, they're cute but they tunnel everywhere) and only one coypu. It exists no longer due to having a bit of a crack marksman as a husband, as they are less than cute, carry the same diseases as rats and also tunnel into the banks, and last year youngsters were even getting in my veg patch eating my produce! Both aquatic mammals are introduced 'escapees' from North and South America respectively, and considered as pests here in France. Having seen the damage they have caused to my lake bank I've become hardened to having to kill 'nuisibles' (so long as I don't have to do it myself - now there I'm a total wimp).

I'm sure the fish are happy and there must be more life than I can see going on. We let much of the pond bank be wild because when I've cleared the brambles beside it in places I found my own ducks just ate the banks! So apart from the lawn end (from where the photo above was taken) and the 'beach', a lot of the edges look like this.

Brambles and a rogue Ragwort growing beside the pond

There hasn't as yet been much in the way of dragonflies or damselflies. I saw my first dragonfly yesterday up by the veg patch but didn't have my camera with me, really annoying as it stopped on the ground in front of me! I did manage to capture two different little damselflies though recently. They are not good photos because they were there one second and gone the next, and they are tiny and I can't get close! Hopefully there'll be more opportunities as summer progresses.

Blue tailed damselfly

White legged damselfly

The rest of the life on the pond centres around the ducks! They seem quite happy but are still not very tame and I doubt they ever will be. They're pretty well behaved and go into their shed at night and just amble about doing their own ducky thing during the day. It's just nice having them around and I enjoy the eggs from the two younger girls who are laying.

Here's Doris having a wash and brush up.

This last photo is Rachel - pronounced the French way if you please, as she is a Rouen after all. If I caption this up with pretty girl again I'll have a load more hits from Thailand googling "nice pretty girls". I don't think she was what they had in mind!!!

Soft fruit

Whilst tree fruit is notoriously unreliable due to the vagaries of the weather and diseases (notably brown rot here), the same cannot be said for soft fruit. It's for that reason that I grow so much of it, because when a lean tree fruit year comes along such as this year, I know I'll still have tons of fruit.

The soft fruit this year is abundant and loving the wet weather. Normally I have to irrigate the raspberries with seep hoses and continually water the strawberries. The wild blackberries here rarely produce decent fruit unless there is adequate rainfall so I now have cultivated thornless varieties in the garden, way too many in fact having seen how many are forming on just two plants, and my friend gave me five of the things! I see a lot of bramble jelly being made; just as well I'm going to England later in the year as my gifts to friends and family are usually home made jam, jelly and chutney!

I also have a new raspberry bed so I've twice as many raspberries as I usually do.

New raspberry bed. Netting wasn't easy and it's not well covered, but so far
neither wild birds nor ducks have taken any interest!

This I've situated along beside the chicken run as it's quite hard sometimes to find the right place to put something like this. It's not ideal for picking the fruit with the fence behind but I thought some canes can grow through into the chicken run and the chooks can have fun jumping up and eating them. I know there will be plenty to share. They absolutely adore raspberries and whenever I go to pick them I get an overexcited squealy audience.....

Two for me, one for them

Actually it works out fine, because there are always some grotty ones which I would normally chuck out for the wild birds to eat so I chuck them to the chooks instead.

Raspberries, like the currants, have very insignificant flowers and I normally only notice when it is flowering time by the buzzing of the bees, who adore them.

Honey bee on raspberry flower

Bumble bee on raspberry flower

Next to the raspberries I have two blackberry plants. I planted these last spring as small plants and had just a few fruit off them (the ducks ate most of them). I will probably have to fence this area off from the ducks with a temporary chicken wire fence again. The fruit are huge and sweet and miles nicer than the wild ones, plus there's the added bonus of not getting snagged on thorns!

Pic taken about a month ago. They keep on growing.....

Blackberries do have pretty flowers, also as much loved by the bees as the raspberries.

Bumble bee in the blackberries. And a fly!

Now. Still producing flowers even though the first fruit are starting to turn dark and ripen!

There's also the one blueberry bush which lives in a pot. Because it likes very acid soil, I had to dig it up as although I had originally planted it with tons of ericaeous compost, it just wasn't enough to acidify my neutral soil. Since putting it into a good sized pot it has grown enormously and whilst I'm not harvesting kilos worth from it, there's a good couple of handfuls every few days which we just eat raw as they are so sweet and delicious.

Delicious blueberries

Last year, as well as acquiring the blackberries I was given some gooseberry canes to take cuttings from. Thankfully this spring I managed to give away all but two of the plants and each of them are now growing fairly well, in a semi shaded position along by the farthest chicken run. The fruit is still quite small and hard though and they are supposed to be red gooseberries, so I'm just checking them regularly and hope they will turn red at some point. Otherwise they'll be green ones!

Either green or red gooseberries!

And then there's the currants! These have been going strong for years now and I have two bushes each of red and blackcurrants. This year the blackcurrants have produced masses of fruit and I've had to prop up the stems as they were so heavy they were trailing on the ground. 

I've so far picked, cleaned and frozen over 8kg of blackcurrants and there's still loads more on the plants. Last year was 7.7kg and the year before 4.8kg (yes I made a note!). Just hope to god I don't get more next year..... Actually I enjoy picking blackcurrants but really loathe doing the redcurrants as they are so soft and squidgy and really hard to pick and get off the stalks. It's not my favourite time of the year but needs must and if I'm to make some more of the famous Susie Gee chilli jam I need redcurrants for it. (Chillies and tomatoes too so hopefully I will get some at some point).

Blackcurrants

Redcurrants at the stage where the flowers start turning into fruits

Ripe and very attractive

Last, but not least, I have strawberries galore too. The early non remontant Gariguettes are over now but the remontant variety called Charlotte will continue to produce fruit until the frosts, though luckily more in fits and starts through the rest of the summer and early autumn. I can't cope with all this harvesting!

Charlotte. Taken in the rain this morning!

At some point I hope to be able to turn my attention back to my non edible garden as it's rapidly becoming a bit messy and in need of some weeding and deadheading and general tidying up, not to mention my house which is in dire need of a clean! But harvest time comes first, and once all those currants and the excess raspberries which we can't eat fresh are in the freezer, I will be free to get on with other things, and the fruit can be dealt with as and when in the future for various recipes such as ice cream, coulis, jelly and cordial. 

A tip: I weigh my fruit before freezing it so I know how much to get out of the freezer for specific recipes. It helps!

Bee hotel update

Time to do a proper posting about my bee hotel project which I mentioned vaguely and showed one photo of in my June flowers post and much earlier on when it was being built! Naughty me, I've shown some photos on Facebook, Google+ and the Brittany and Normandy forum (from whence the original idea came) but neglected to keep up with it here!

The point of these boxes, often known as bee hotels, B&Bs or condos are to provide nesting places for solitary bees to lay their eggs in. They aren't places where bees sleep so are slightly mis-named. I originally mentioned the building of this hotel back in January on a posting called "Giving nature a helping hand". It's taken me some time to search for that - good grief that was a while back, how time flies! The link which I gave earlier to an external site giving a lot of good information about solitary bees and building hotels for them is here.

It's no longer easy for me to get in to take photos now that the hotel is in place on the east facing garage windowsill. Wild red poppies, Californian poppies and calendula have self seeded in this fairly wild spot in front of it, but I did manage to creep in to take some close up photos of some of the filled in holes.

Back in May a couple of the largest holes were filled in; these I think are the Mason bees which usually like to use the holes in our window frames which are designed for letting any water which gets in, out!

For a while I thought that was it as no other bees seemed to be interested, but obviously the Mason bees must lay earlier than other species of solitary bee. In the last few weeks there has been a lot of activity with different sized holes being filled in and I've seen several different sizes of bee going in and out of the holes.

Even the really tiny 1-2mm diameter holes have started to fill up.

I'm not entirely sure but I think some of the canes are being used too - it looks like the three in the centre of the photo have been filled in, or are in the process of being filled in. The canes with white centres are unhollowed out ones as I thought I'd try a good mixture of hollow bamboo canes and unhollow but soft centred canes and sticks, just to see what was popular and what wasn't.

It seems to me that the drilled holes are the popular ones though. Since taking these photos more holes have been filled in and yesterday I waited a while and took a few photos of some of the small bees visiting. I can't get decent photos though as they are so small and I'm the other side of the poppies!

This bee came along and seemed to be a bit disappointed that there weren't any of the medium sized holes left in this square block but after a while got busy with the next smallest empty hole. I really need to sit here for a while with the telephoto lens as if I creep in close the bees may be put off, but they are so tiny I can't crop the photos any more or they'd just be a blur!

Edit to say: since yesterday this hole has now been filled in!!!

Then along came a really tiny bee, one of the ones which have been going into the tiny holes on the left hand vertical strip of wood. Can you see it? It's that black speck in the bottom left of the photo!

I'm finding this really fascinating and exciting, especially seeing such tiny creatures that I didn't even know existed. We're all used to seeing bumble bees and honey bees which are of a reasonable size, but to think there are so many of these little things happily pollinating our flowers that we might have thought were just ants, if we'd even noticed them at all, that is.

I also came across a bumble bee nest hole in the lawn yesterday! I wouldn't have noticed it obviously, but for the fact that several Red Tailed bumble bees were milling about just above the grass. On closer inspection I saw a hole beneath the grass, so I watched and waited and saw several go in and come out again. This bee is hovering just above the nest hole which is the darker patch that you can see.

Yes, it's official. I'm becoming a bit of a bee geek. :-)

Update for the bee hotel in October:
http://chateaumoorhen.blogspot.fr/2012/10/bee-hotel-update-october.html