Big Garden Birdwatch and January flowers

First things first, this is just to let you know that my blogging will be a bit sporadic over the next six weeks, as I've just embarked on an online photography course for learning how to use my camera in manual mode, and get away from using auto anything! I'll be taking tons of photos, but many will not be pertinent to my blog anyway, and my time will be taken up with this course. I will occasionally get some photos posted even if I don't write much, as this is, amongst other things, my garden diary, and I expect to see more happening over the next six weeks!

This last weekend was the Big Garden Birdwatch run by the RSPB, and at the same time the French equivalent, the LPO, were also running theirs. As Saturday was a beautiful sunny mild day, I thought I'd have a go. You sit somewhere and count the birds that you see in your garden over a one hour period, discounting birds flying overhead. This is my tally:

Blue Tits 9
House Sparrows 4
Great Tits 3
Chaffinches 2
Moorhens 2
Robin 1
Starling 1

Well that was slightly disappointing, not in the numbers but sheer lack of species, but just goes to show that watching your birds for one hour won't necessarily mean that you will see them all, even some of the more common ones! No blackbirds, dunnocks or magpies, and despite scanning the conifer trees through my binoculars, I saw nothing small, hidden or skulking. I'm not cheating, because I know for sure they live here, but I did position myself in a place where I could see a part of my lake, in the hope that I would see a moorhen or two. Which I did! And then I took a few photos of the tits visiting my peanuts.

Blue Tit

Great Tit

Unfortunately I can't count the birds I saw across the field down the bottom of the garden after I'd done my one hour count. I heard a racket and saw loads of birds which I assumed were starlings up in the tree tops - yes most were starlings, but there were also fieldfares (a species of thrush which are winter visitors) in amongst them. This is very zoomed in!

Several Fieldfares amongst dozens of Starlings (the dozens mostly out of this picture!).

Happened to notice this whilst walking around with my binocs - can you
see the 'frog' in the hole, in the middle of the picture of my big old oak tree?

Back to my plants, a reflection of distant trees and the orangey/red stems
of my dogwood, Cornus sanguinea 'Winter Flame'.

Hooray! In a hurry to post this, because I took this Snowdrop
shot last Thursday and they are now starting to open!

So are my Oriental Hellebores.
Bit of a naff photo because I need to cut off all the old leaves
and stalks to show up the beauty of the new flowers.

And this is one flower bud I am ecstatic to see - Purple Sprouting Broccoli!
I think this is the variety 'Rudolph', which is earlier than the others.
Unfortunately my labels are now useless because I wrote in pencil
which has washed off in all the rain!

I've got dozens of these lying in the weeds of the veg patch.
It's the skeletonised papery husk of a Physalis fruit.
As beautiful and photogenic as skeletonised Hydrangea petals!

And now I must go back to school. I feel like I'm skiving off! :-)

Getting down and dirty with the 'shrooms

In the course of clearing the jungle like vegetation which threatens to swamp my perimeter fence, I found this large hole in the fence. No wonder my naughty cats have been seen going walkabout! I would be none the wiser if not for my English neighbour who has said he saw three cats including a ginger one in their garden, and also when he was working for another neighbour he even found Harry shut in an outbuilding when he went in there to do something!

But far more worring is what on earth kind of animal made this hole. It wasn’t the cats trying to get out, that’s for sure. This fence is pretty tough and something would have had to gnaw through the wire and then push it back like this into this perfect circle. We have racked our brains trying to think what it could have been. A coypu (aka swamprat or ragondin) have the rat like teeth to do so, but the hole is miles bigger than they need to get in; in any case we haven’t seen any here for about 9 months. And the hole is much bigger than a fox would need. Bit worrying really! But it’s now blocked off and we will keep an eye on it.

A rather worrying hole!

So onto the fungi. I had spotted a bunch of tiny fungi that had appeared a couple of days ago and thought I’d have yet another bash at trying to capture them. I have friends who will probably look at this post who love their fungi and take loads of great pics of them, but I don’t seem to find anything interesting in my garden and what I do find is always low down. So on with the waterproof trousers so I could kneel down, sit down and lie down in the mud!

I was lucky that this midgey thing landed on this fungi just as I was looking through the viewfinder, as any bug makes a shroom shot a lot more interesting to me!

Thanks little midgey thing!

I had to use flash for most of my photos as unfortunately a dull January afternoon in a woodland setting means very little light.

It's almost impossible to get down to ground level with tiny fungi!

Showing how small they are.

Dear Bertie (there's always a cat in the way when I'm shooting things these days)
at least serves a purpose to give you an idea of how tiny these fungi are!

I found a couple more on a rotting log that’s in our wildlife pile, but most of the original wood stacked there about nine years ago is now rather covered in brambles, leaves, branches and the like and I can’t really see the original logs placed there. Other logs and dead stumps that have been in the woodland since we moved here never seem to have any fungi growing out of them. Only moss! 

The only fungi I found growing out of a rotting log in our wildlife pile.

The last fungi shot is Turkey Tails which are looking past their best, but a midge was wandering around over it and again, that was more interesting to me!

Turkey Tail fungus with a different kind of midge - note the fluffy antennae.
You'll need to click on the picture to view it full size.

The following collage shows the sort of thing one sees in a winter garden. A lot of the green in the woodland area comes from moss and ivy!

Top is a Sycamore seed germinating.
Lichen that's fallen from a tree attached to a dead twig.
Rotting log covered in moss and ivy (but no fungi!).

I’ll finish this post with a bit of moss. The first is my lovely granite trough that we discovered years after moving here - it was upside down under a shrub and we just thought it was a large rock until a bunch of strong guys turned it over for me and I was over the moon when I saw what it was!

My granite trough covered with moss.

Mossy jungle - think these 'flowers' are called Sporophytes.

I would try to learn more about moss, but if you've ever looked at the Wikipedia entry, you need a degree in science/botany to understand it. Even worse if you look at the page about Sporophytes! Go on, have a look. 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sporophyte 

I have more pics from the garden including a few flowers so I'll do another post in a few days.

January ramblings

January always seems such a long and boring month. I alternate between feeling full of beans and wanting to get outside and get on with loads of winter gardening jobs.....

"I want to go out to play! But it's raining :-("

.....and then feeling totally lethargic and blah, and even trying to write a blog post seems interminable.

"Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz"

There are always indoor jobs to do, like sorting through my apples which are going off rapidly due to the mild weather. It's just not cold enough in the garage. I should be stewing up the ones that are going off but it took me an entire day to prep and cook double quantities for this mammoth cauldron of chutney so I'm a bit sick of apples! I even did some housework rather than peel and chop apples again, which is almost unheard of!

Apple, date and walnut chutney.

Most of what I've been doing outside has been ripping out brambles and chopping back saplings which always threaten to take over. I have wild patches in the garden but there's a limit to how much I want to be completely impregnable jungle! It's actually a job that I really enjoy despite thorns still getting through my thick gloves. The veg patch is still a mess as it's rather soggy for digging and weeding so that will have to wait. 

One job I did finally get round to doing in there was to dig up the dahlias that I grew from seed. Yes, seed! I didn't even know you could sow dahlia seeds and get mature flowering plants in one season! They came from a packet of Thomson & Morgan seeds, a mix of flowers 'for butterflies'. Well they were a pretty poor selection for butterflies (no Verbena bonariensis?!) and was a rather odd mix of flowers, many of which I didn't know at all. It wasn't anywhere near as popular with bees and hoverflies as the plants that grew from the 'pollinator mix' that I saved seed from and resowed last year. Probably the most popular plants were the dahlias and cosmos, which were also the plants which flowered the longest. Anyhow I now have 5 healthy dahlia tubers for the price of a packet of seed, so it did work out to be worthwhile after all! There's a garish pink, a garish orange, a lemon and a couple of creamy ones. I'm assuming they are dwarf ones but who knows, maybe they will be bigger next year? 

Lemon Dahlia in the middle with garish pink with yellow centre
on the right towards the background. The orange one was very similar.

Pink Dahlia again, amongst pretty Cosmos
that I forgot to save seed of!

Here it is again attracting a bumble bee,
and a Pisaura mirabilis spider. Don't worry, the bee wasn't harmed!

Back to January in the garden and the weather has been so mild that we've only had one frost since well before Christmas! Some overnight lows have been around the 11C-12C mark, which is ridiculously warm. I've seen a blackbird with a twig in its beak, and although the only birds actually singing are the robins, which do sing in winter, there seems to be more lively twittering going on when I go out in the mornings to let out the chickens. Yet as far as flowers go, my snowdrops and hellebores are only in bud and nothing seems more advanced than normal for this time of year.

Prunus subhirtella, my spindly ornamental cherry, is enjoying the mild weather.
The only thing is that the blooms are a bit wasted unless we have blue sky to show them up!

A close up of one of the flowers.

Some buggy thing has been nibbling my Primrose!

In the absence of flowers (or bugs), when we do get some sunshine after a shower, there are always droplets to use as photography subjects.

Little mossy forest.

Euphorbia myrsinitis (one of the earliest to bloom).

Another Euphorbia (probably wulfenii characias), self seeded.

And I keep being drawn back to those Hydrangea petals!