Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
Toilet roll tubes are biodegradable so, when these sweet peas are ready, I can put them straight in the ground without disturbing the long tap root. I’ve used soil from the greenhouse, which I’d refreshed with plenty of garden compost in the autumn. I’ll probably get a little weed seedlings springing up but I’ll keep pulling those out and the sweet peas shouldn’t have any difficulty competing with them.
There isn’t room to walk into our shed without moving the stack of plastic trugs that stand in the doorway. On the left, hanging on the wall or leaning against it, are spades, forks and rakes, some of which belonged to my father and some to my father-in-law, Bill Ellis. I’m particularly glad to have a long-handled cultivator – a four-pronged cross between a fork and a rake – because I think that might have come from my grandad, Robert Bell, who had an allotment just across the road from his cottage in Sutton-cum-Lound near Retford.
The large black pond net, which I use to scoop up duckweed, would probably be safer stored in the garage as it’s had several holes nibbled in it by the mice that occasionally adopt the shed as their winter quarters.
We left it too late to buy our Maris Peer second early potatoes last year, so we took no chances this year and got these on the back bedroom windowsill chitting two weeks ago.
I found the Telephone Pen nib that I used scratchy and blotty, but that’s fine as I wanted an inky effect. Controlling my usual urge to add cross-hatching, I used a Chinese writing set to add the ink wash. The brush is made of goat’s tail hair.
It’s been a bad day for the local goats: they’re serving goat curry at the takeaway at the end of the road. It smelt delicious, but we haven’t been brave enough to try it yet.
1.45 pm, Monday 25 January: So far no takers. I’ve somewhat hopefully set up my DSLR, Olympus Tough and even my iPhone all focussed on the birdbath. Just a few feet away there are long-tailed tits, wood pigeons and starlings feeding but nothing is touching down for a quick drink.
What do you know?! – just as I wrote that, a blue tit came down and perched exactly on the spot that I’d focussed on. Let’s hope that the memory card lasted out!
Unfortunately it’s just as I expected: the blue tit turned up a few minutes after the two cameras ran out of memory. It should be there on the iPhone but that’s just taking a general view.
I give it another try and 3.30 pm, which in winter is late afternoon, proves to be a better time. Within the first five minutes this blue tit comes down to drink, then flies up to the sunflower hearts feeder.
I could have guaranteed some bird action if I’d focussed on the feeders but it’s going to take a bit more arranging to get my cameras up on that level. Besides, a bird’s bathing routine is going to be more interesting than just watching them feeding.
Just to be sure that I’d get something, I set up the iPhone at the foot of feeding pole, so at least I’ll have some close-up shots of blackbirds, chaffinch and robin on the ground.
Wrens at a sparrow box in mid-January – are they roosting or thinking about a nest site? And what will happen when the resident blue tit returns?
In the sequence where the two wrens are hopping around on top of the box, it looks as if one of them has a small green caterpillar in its bill. This could be courtship feeding, so the tour of alternative nest holes might be the male giving the female a tour of possible nest sites.
Wednesday 13 January, Barbara’s diary: Some day we will get it right for the birds!
First we put up a blue tit box and sparrows nested in it, so we replaced it with a sparrow terrace with three nest holes and the blue tits nested in it.
Now the blue tits are sub-letting to a group of wrens.
As I went to make our morning cuppa, passing the back door something caught my eye, I looked out at the sparrow box and in the half light could see a little head appear from hole number one. I was amazed to see a wren fly out and it was quickly followed by three more, they had obviously been using it as an overnight roost.
We had spotted a wren yesterday coming out of hole number three, while at the same time a blue tit was taking great interest in hole number one. Another blue tit attempted to investigate the middle hole but the one at hole one in no uncertain terms let it know it wasn’t welcome, although it didn’t seem bothered by the wren.
It would be lovely to think that we could have blue tit and wren making a nest in the terrace this Spring and a bonus would be a sparrow in the middle. Well, who knows what will happen with these contrary birds!
Barbara Bell
Saturday 16 January, 4.45 pm: I’d seen a wren hopping about on the hedge but it was taking its time coming over to the nestbox. That changed when a blue tit flew over an perched at the left-hand nest hole. Within seconds the wren was there, perching on the edge of the box and, in no uncertain terms, letting the blue tit know that it wasn’t welcome.
The wren popped into the hole for just a few seconds before flitting out again. We don’t know if there are any wrens roosting in the box tonight. On previous nights we’ve seen three going in there as darkness falls.
The leaves of this purple sage proved a bit tough when Barbara was making the stuffing this Christmas but a clump of the regular sage-green variety, growing at the end of our herb bed had smaller, more tender, leaves. It gave an aromatic lift to the stuffing, made to recipe Barbara’s mum, Betty, used every year. And it lasted until Boxing Day to go in our chicken sandwiches.
These celeriacs smell deliciously of celery but as they aren’t much bigger than golf balls, by the time we’ve trimmed them down there won’t be much left. We’d never grown them before but a neighbour had plenty of seedlings so we thought that we’d give it a try. We probably won’t grow them again.
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.
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.
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.
There’s still some mid-autumn colour in our flower but it’s not quite as punchy as my photographs suggest: today I’ve had the Art Filter on my Olympus E-M10 II set to Pop Art. All taken with the macro lens. I’m especially pleased with the detail on fly; as it was quite a cool day, the fly allowed me to push the lens towards it without buzzing off.
