Category: Garden

Roosting Wrens

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.

wren at the nest box

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.

blue tit
Barbara’s iPhone photograph of the blue tit at nest hole 1.

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.

Sage

sage

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.

sage
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Categorized as Herbs Tagged

Celeriac

celariac

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.

Stuggart Giant

onions

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.

onion

3-Bay Compost Bin

compost bin plan
drawing board

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

compost bin
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.

Autumn Colour

  • Sunflower
  • Pot marigold
  • Carnation
  • Golden Hornet crab apples
  • Coneflower, Echinacea
  • Rose Jude the Obscure
  • Rose Jude the Obscure
  • Lady’s mantle
  • Nasturtium
  • Penstemon
  • Poppy
  • Raspberry, Joan Jay
  • Hylotelephium (Sedum) spectabile
  • Sweet Pea
  • Verbena bonariensis

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.

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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Categorized as Garden Tagged

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.