As the name suggests, our Stuggart Giant sets gave us plenty of onions from a 4×6 foot section of our raised beds. Unfortunately because of the unpredictable weather last summer we weren’t able to gather the whole crop in to dry them in the greenhouse – there wasn’t room on the staging for the whole crop – so a lot of them stayed out in heavy rain. Probably because of this we found that a lot of them had gone soft before we got the chance to use them – including most of those in my drawing; they’ll be going straight to the compost bin.
This wouldn’t put me off growing the variety again, they’re a mild onion, which we like. We’d just make sure that we started early drying them off.
Despite the stringent security, the sheep in the beet field have finally staged an escape and half a dozen of the more adventurous of them are enjoying the lush grass in the back garden of the end terrace house on the other side of the fence.
“What variety are they?” I ask the shepherd (I knew he was the shepherd because his 4×4 had an ‘EWE’ registration).
“They’re Swaledales with a few Texel, but they’re mainly mules. These came from Horton-in-Ribblesdale.”
So none of them are Beulah Speckleface, as I’d guessed the other day.
Hawes Round-up
A few weeks ago in Hawes we saw Swaledales being rounded up from the moors. That morning we’d seen people gathering up at Bardale Head two miles south of the town, so I guess the sheep had been driven up Bardale and Raydale onto the moor then turned back down Beggarmans Road and through Gayle into Hawes. There were certainly hundreds, if not thousands of them.
It’s been a while since I drew anything just for the fun of it, so simply drawing the pile of books on the coffee table in pen appealed to me. That didn’t seem quite enough, so I added the small jug from the sideboard and brought a pen and pencil into the picture.
The book is Jane McMorland Hunter’sA Nature Poem for Every Day of the Year, which we’ve kept up to since our friend Jill bought me if for my birthday in April. This morning’s poem though had a touch of the supernatural about it: The Sphinx by Oscar Wilde.
Three times around Illingworth Park,Ossett, is one mile and, although we’ve walked it so many times since the first lockdown, it’s always different. This morning, using Adobe Photoshop Camera on my iPhone, I’ve gone for an art filter which puts the emphasis on colour, as a contrast to last week’s linear woodcut effect.
The heightened colour on the daisies reminds me of the heightened coloru of Pre-Raphaelite paintings, such as William Holman Hunt’s The Hireling Shepherd.
The mushrooms that I photographed last week have gone but a bracket fungus and ear fungus on elders by the allotment fence make equally appealing subjects.
I need to work out exactly how much timber I’ll need for my 3-bay compost bins and I’m struggling to do a back-of-an-envelope type sketch with ruler and pencil in my sketchbook. So why am I struggling? – I’ve got a drawing board with parallel motion and drafting head stowed away in the corner at the other end of my studio. I’ve enjoyed the excuse to get it out again to draw an orthographic plan and elevations.
My old compost bin was made from recycled timber from next door’s summer house (which itself had been recycled from a previous existence as a lean-to conservatory) but after ten or fifteen years that was ready for replacement and this time I’m going to use FSC-certified decking boards with 3×2 inch uprights.
Turning the Heap
We won’t be going for lids on the bins this time, an offcut of carpet will have suffice to stop the compost getting waterlogged in the rain.
Previous twin bins: the lids proved awkward.
I’m keen to have a better arrangement for the front panels, so that will be slats which will drop into grooves. The idea of having three smaller bins in place of the larger twin bins I had before, is that it should be easier to get a system going of turning the heap. The garden waste will start off on the left in bin number one, then I’ll fork it over into bin number two in the middle ending up with one final turning into number three on the right. Composting is an aerobic process, so that will be two opportunities to let the air get to the compost and also to mix soft green waste, which on its own can become claggy and anaerobic, with dry fibrous brown waste.
The man with stylus and tablet isn’t drawing, he tells us, he’s surveying trees and vegetation impinging on the power lines. The pole that he’s looking at is so swathed in ivy that it almost looks like a tree.
“Do you have to go to species level?” I ask him.
When he explains that he’s a trained arborist, I can’t resist asking if he can tell what species of pine I’ve just photographed. Is it Corsican? Or Scots Pine?
As the tree is 50 yards down the lane, I’m expecting a lot, especially, as he points out, if it has been pruned that can change the silhouette, but he suggests that it might be black pine.
Ash Die-back
This old milestone from the Wakefield to Huddersfield Turnpike was catching the sun this morning.
Opposite the pine, an old ash tree was pollarded a few months ago, following hints of die-back on some of its boughs.
A report on BBC Leeds Look North this week showed the efforts that the National Trust are going to in the Yorkshire Dales to deal with the 80% of ash trees in their woodland that have been infected.
The surveyor tells us that local authorities have been surveying their ash trees because an infected tree can shed a large bough.
We tell him of a couple of near misses that we’ve had with the sweet chestnuts shedding branches in the woods at Nostell, where in recent years they’ve lost some centuries-old beech trees.
The trees around here are either 200 years old or saplings, he suggests; there hasn’t been any consistent replanting.
Beet Eaters
The sheep in the beet field look like Beulah Speckleface, or a similar-looking hybrid, a breed that combines the hardiness of hill sheep with the growth and reproduction rates of lowland varieties. For the last few weeks, these sheep have been enjoying a more high-energy, sugar-rich food than they’d get out on the moors, eating first the tops of the beet, then the beets themselves, although I can’t help thinking that they must be looking longingly at the grass in the next field as a change from gnawing the beets.
Shetland Pony
I’m trying to photograph three ponies feeding together at a hay bale but I don’t have much luck with the Shetland. All I can see are the tops of its ears at the far side but then it spots me and wanders over to the wall to say hello. Some day I might get a group portrait.
“As we head down the track we spot a buzzard being mobbed by a magpie and kestrel. As it dips and soars fending off the two birds another buzzard soars carefree over the ridge.”
From Barbara’s nature diary, 30 January 2020
I needed to inject a bit of drama into my next (January 2021) Wild Yorkshire diary for The Dalesman, so I’m illustrating the incident Barbara described, along with a male stonechat perching on a fence post. The pen and watercolour of the reedbed and lagoon will go right across at the foot of the double-page spread. I was busy with Sandal Castle and the Rhubarb Festival last January, so I’m having to recreate what my sketchbook might have looked like if I’d had time to draw on the day.
For this morning’s stroll around a foggy Illingworth Park, Ossett, I’ve gone for a woodcut effect. These were taken on my iPhone, using an art filter in the Adobe Photoshop Camera app. You get a preview of the effect, so I soon found myself looking at the world through woodcut-tinted glasses. Amongst my favourites are the drystone wall, the fungi and the allotment fence.
Another iPhone drawing, this is velvet shank fungus growing on an old stump at Nostell last January. The effect of Adobe Fresco’s natural inker in various opaque colours reminds me of oil pastels, which I briefly experimented with in my student day. I like the out-of-control energy of the swirling line, which was literally out-of-control as I struggled again with my Wacom Bamboo stylus slipping about on the protective glass screen of the phone.
It’s so different to my usual nature diary sketches for The Dalesman but I’ll drop it into the layout and I think that it might work in the context of the article, I’m not producing a field guide and this article is about the way life seems to be waiting to burst forth once we get to January.
On an online course I’m doing, Become a Better Presenter, a free FutureLearn course from The Royal Observatory, Greenwich, we’ve been asked to write a script for an imagined talk about making a sandwich pitched to a specific audience. I’m going for our local naturalists’ society:
So, you’re heading for the Peak District: what are the essentials for fieldwork?
OPENS HAVERSACK
Notebook? yes, got that . . . binoculars? Check! . . . waterproofs . . And, yes, thought someone would suggest it: lunch! But this is no ordinary packed lunch . . .
OPENS BOX
. . . this sandwich was developed by survival expert Ray Mears, who says he always takes one with him whenever he heads for the hills.
GETS OUT INGREDIENTS
And it’s simple to make:
The bread, I’m going for wholemeal and actually this is homemade and in this case the flour was ground at a centuries-old watermill at Worsborough.
Butter? To give us a protein boost we’re going for peanut butter, organic of course, and – controversially – I’m a chunky man.
Instant energy? This is pure Peak District heather honey from last August, which was exceptional for heather, hope you managed to get out there, it was a sea of purple over The Strines. One teaspoon, so that’s 1,500 bee miles across the moors . . . but it’s going to be a tough hike so let’s make it two: that’s 3,000 miles!
Finally the main event: a superfood developed in the greenhouses at Chatsworth by Joseph Paxton: the Cavendish banana!
Link
Become a Better Presenter : Improve Your Public Speaking Skills, a free FutureLearn course. Learn how to improve your presentation skills and add personality into your presentation style on this three-week course. Learn from The Presenter Network at the Royal Observatory Greenwich.
