I promise this is the final instalment in my vegetable trilogy: vine-ripened tomatoes. And these were supermarket grown, although I’m hoping we’ll still have some ripening in the greenhouse into next month.
Tomatoes
Month: September 2021
Red Peppers
Back to the veg rack for my subject today, red peppers. I did try growing them this year but in our unheated greenhouse they never ripened and we ate them green.
Sweet Potato
Looking rather like grey seals resting on a beach, two sweet potatoes from the veg rack.
Preening Canada Geese
The preening routine of a Canada goose involves Pilates-style stretching and twisting.
Deep in the Wood
This children’s book, first published in 1987 by Heinemann, was inspired by us moving down to Coxley Valley a few years earlier.
At this time of year, the wood and meadow have taken on the early autumnal look that sets the mood for the story, such as it is: it’s a walk through the wood looking at the way birds and animals use sight, smell, hearing, touch and taste.
I included butterflies tasting through their feet and bees seeing ultra-violet but my spread of a pipistrelle bat using echo location turned out looking a bit too technical to sit comfortably with the other spreads.
Corinthian Capitals
John Carr’s Corinthian columns give Horbury’s parish church of St Peter & St Leonard’s an air of grandeur, in contrast to the old parish church, demolished in 1791, which, in his talk today, Keith Lister suggests may originally have been a timber building, like some surviving thousand-year old Scandinavian churches.
Keith’s talk as part of Horbury Heritage Weekend is ‘Horbury in the time of Baring-Gould, 1864-7’.
Hoof Fungus
This hoof fungus, Fomes fomentarius, appears to have powdered the roots of the beech it is growing on with a film of rusty spores.
It’s also known as the tinder bracket because it has been used as in fire-starting since prehistoric times.
Bromeliad
From my student sketchbook, South Kensington, February 1973: I bought this Bromeliad from a plant shop on Gloucester Road for 80 pence. Bromeliads are epiphytes from Brazil . . . but as to which species this is . . . I don’t know. I water it by filling the central rosette.
These crumbly, flakey, croissants are splendid to draw and tasted as good as they looked . . . reminding me of Petit-dejeuner on sunny mornings on the balcony of the Hotel de Centinaire in the Dordogne.
Town Gardening
I’ve dipped into my winter 1973 student sketchbook because this morning I had to decide on one book to throw out – no not the sketchbook! – as I’m trying to send one book to the charity shop for every new book that I buy.
Difficult decision as even books that I’m never going to read again have some nostalgic value for me. I bought Town Gardening by Robert Pearson for 15 pence from a bookshop on a quieter back street somewhere near the Kensington end of the Earl’s Court Road and, like the house plants, it was part of my attempt to create my own little green space in the city.
In the student hostel at Evelyn Gardens had a window ledge where I grew sweet corn in cut-down milk tetrapacks. I started – but never finished – constructing my own version of a Wardian case with built-in fluorescent lights.
So the advice in Town Gardening, to use Mowrah meal, derris, DDT or lead arsenate to get rid of that ‘troublesome pest’ the earthworm, when it disfigures your lawn, wasn’t, thank goodness relevant to me.
Yes, probably a wise move parting with this book.
Dinobirds
When birds revert to their dinosaur origins . . .
Pectoral Sandpipers
Two pectoral sandpipers feeding in shallow water on the Eastern Reedbed at RSPB St Aidan’s are migrants, probably blown off course by an Atlantic low on their migration from their breeding grounds on the east coast of North America to their wintering quarters in South America. They’re slightly larger than the dunlins feeding by the small muddy islands nearby.
Some of the dunlins have slightly indistinct black bellies as they moult out of their summer breeding plumage into the ‘dunlin’ – the name means ‘dull brown’ – winter plumage.
We’re encouraged to make gardens accessible to hedgehogs by ensuring there’s access for them under fences. This animal run under the perimeter fence at St Aidan’s serves the same purpose. It looks about rabbit size but apparently foxes can make their way through a hole no larger than a fist, so this could be a multi-species animal highway. If it wasn’t so far from home, I’d be tempted to set up my trail cam here.
We walked beyond the boundaries of the reserve on our circuit today, taking the path alongside the River Aire as far as the weir below Lemonroyd Lock.
