Category: Garden

Green Tomatoes

green tomatoes

It was raining yesterday afternoon, so I sheltered in the greenhouse to draw, positioning myself to avoid most of the drips.

Our beef and plum tomatoes are slow to ripen but the last three months of the meteorological summer have been well below average for hours of sunshine, so that’s not surprising. Rather than grow them in buckets of potting compost as we normally do, we’ve got them growing directly in the soil of the raised bed in the greenhouse, which I refreshed by swopping bucketfuls of soil from our veg beds and adding plenty of our garden compost.

It’s like a jungle in there. The plants are much lusher than they would have been in pots, but we need to strip off some of the leaves now to allow the light and air in to ripen the fruits.

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Ripening Peppers

Peppers

We haven’t grown peppers for years but one of our neighbours offered us seeds so we thought we’d give it another try. Like our tomatoes, they’re taking their time to ripen.

Sunflowers

sunflowers pen and ink

I like drawing sunflowers because of their obvious structure. Despite the repetition, each petal and sepal is slightly different so in drawing them you get into a rhythm, rather like practicing letterforms in calligraphy.

Near the bird feeder in the border we found one sunflower growing from a spilt seed. A few weeks ago it produced a single large flower-head, which has now gone to seed. Meanwhile five or six smaller flowers have appeared.

Sunflowers

Sunflowers thrive in the rich soil of our border. Last year we tried daisy-like cosmos flowers here, which we’d grown from seed from a Gardeners’ World magazine. They grew tall and leafy but by mid-autumn they’d put out just a handful of flowers. I feel that we would have had more success in getting them to flower if our soil hadn’t been so rich.

sunflowers drawing

As Storm Ellen swept across Britain on Friday, one of the sunflower heads snapped off and another looked as if it would be next to go. We brought three heads in as cut flowers.

sunflowers

Because they do so well in rich soil, we’ve decided to try growing sunflowers on our revamped meadow area next year. We’ll grow plenty of them from bird seed and hopefully there will be enough flowers for me to draw but plenty left of the plants for the insects and birds.

Geranium and grasses

geranium and grasses

These grasses and the clump of geranium by the pond reminded me of the sort of subject that Frederick Franck would draw in his book The Zen of Seeing, so I decided on a change from my usual pen and colour wash and I’ve stuck with line only. Typically Franck would add a hint of tone by dabbing parts of the drawing with a wet brush or finger tip. I can’t do that as I use waterproof ink.

I had to accept that I wasn’t going to be able to pin down this subject as the grasses were swishing around in the breeze.

Great Yorkshire Creature Count

Creature Count

The Yorkshire Wildlife Trust’s Creature Count is underway this weekend, getting people to count as many species as they can in their gardens. Here are some of the usual suspects that I would now be rounding up, if I’d signed up for the survey this year, but I’m a bit pressed with work in the studio. Must try and join in if they run it next year.

Broad Beans

broad beans

There’s a background buzz of bumble and what look like honey bees amongst the flowers fo these broad beans. A song thrush sings from nearby bushes. Yesterday afternoon there was a bit of drama as a crow chased a jackdaw away from the ash trees at the edge of the wood – perhaps the crows have a nest there.

hand fork
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Bee Hotel

bee hotel cartoon

The card shops and National Trust gift shops have yet to reopen so I’m still producing homemade birthday cards, this one celebrating a birthday and a very successful bee hotel. The day our friend John Gardner finished constructing it and put it in place, several solitary bees moved in.

cat cards

Meanwhile the numerous cats who wonder through our back garden provide material for cards, including these two characters. When it came to a showdown, ‘Bear’ through bluster and body language had no trouble seeing off the smaller ‘Wildcat’ tabby.

Basil

basil

We should be self-sufficient in pesto this year because our basil seedlings have got off to a good start. We discovered that the ones we’d potted on did better on the kitchen windowsill than in the greenhouse, probably because we had some cool nights.

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Weed Knife

weed knife

I think that my previous small plastic weed knife might have ended up in a bucket destined for the compost heap, so I had the perfect excuse for upgrading to a Darlac Bamboo Weed Knife, which is a big improvement. I was drawing these while listening to today’s Adobe podcast and perhaps because of the distraction, I made a mistake with the proportion of the blade (it’s not quite that long).

The bent screwdriver has in the past been used for weeding crevices between paving and it’s also opened many cans of paint. I often took it to Pageant Players to open cans of emulsion that hadn’t been opened since the previous year’s production. This was my dad’s best ratchet screwdriver and I remember my horror when I bent it as he was liable to become explosively angry when tools went astray!

My favourite pair of secateurs were an unmissable bargain ten or so years ago but they cut better the others that we use. A satisfyingly crisp ‘snip’ as you cut through anything up to about half an inch thick.

Drawing this, I realised that my current favourite pen is the Lamy Vista with the Extra Fine nib, used in the lower two drawings. It’s a bit freer flowing than the TWSBI Ecot, which might be the one I’d favour if I was ever aiming for precision and detail.

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Earthworm

earthworm
earthworm

I’m pleased to regularly come across earthworms as I dig the veg beds. This is a juvenile, as it hasn’t developed a clitellum: the swollen band around its body, which makes it difficult to identify: in Britain we have 27 species of earthworm.

Link

Opal Key to Common British Earthworms