Stripy brown-lipped snails hunker down on ivy leaves in our hedges. I find them even when I’m up the steps, cutting back the top branches.
We’re continuing to harvest plenty of produce from the veg beds – courgettes, potatoes, spinach, rhubarb and autumn raspberries – but we’re taking a break from beans: the french and broad beans are over but the runners, which have masses of scarlet flowers, are taking their time to burst into full flow.
One or two holly blues have been visiting the ivy, which, along with the holly, is one of the food plants of the caterpillar.
Drawing on one layer in Procreate
My drawing was made in the Procreate drawing program on my iPad Pro. For a change, I’ve drawn it all on one layer. I usually keep pencil roughs, ink and colour on separate layers, which keeps the line work unblemished but that means that I’m missing out on all the efforts that the Procreate designers have put into making digital drawing feel like its real world equivalent. In this case, I don’t mind if the pen and ink gets slightly blurred as I add the colour.
One morning last week, after a wild and windy night, we found this nest, which I think was made by goldfinches, on the lawn at the foot of the rowan in the front garden. It’s just three inches (8 cm) across and very light. There were no signs of eggs or chicks in or around it, so I think that it had been dislodged by the wind, rather than raided by a predator, such as a magpie or cat.
It’s composed mainly of frizzy wool-like material, which might be dog hair, wool or even some manmade down. It is too long and curly to be thistle down. The nest is decorated with strands of moss around the outside with a few long threads curled around the inside of the cup, which are possibly horse hair but more likely textile thread. As I went out to measure it just now, a week after it fell, I noticed a tiny rove beetle amongst the fibres in the centre of the cup.
A month or more ago, a goldfinch was singing from the telephone cables near the rowan tree and sometimes there would be a pair of them perching there, so I wondered if they had a nest nearby.
It’s been a good year for goldfinches and garden birds in general, with young bullfinches, chaffinches, blackbirds, starlings, blue tits and great tits coming to our back garden bird feeders, but goldfinches are the most numerous. Yesterday a flock – a charm to use the collective noun – of goldfinches flew up from feeding on the fluffy seed-heads of creeping thistle in the meadow by the wood.
Even by boosting the contrast, I can’t really pick out any definite tracks at the entrance to my animal tracking tunnel, which has now been sitting amongst the long grass by the hedge at the end of the garden for two days. The damp paper along the edges might have been nibbled by slugs.
As I moved in to take a close-up photograph, a vole ran out from the tunnel. It happened so quickly that I wondered if it really had been in there or whether it had been hidden in the grass at my feet but when I slid out the bait tray I could see that half the sunflower hearts had disappeared.
One of the sunflower hearts had been nibbled at one end to expose the seed inside.
In the milk bottle top that serves as a bowl for the bait something has been nibbling away at what I think might be fragments of peanuts in the peanut butter. Traces of slime suggest that slugs or snails have been visiting the tunnel.
I’ve topped up the bait with sunflower hearts, so my tracking tunnel has now become a vole feeding station.
I’ve tied the tunnel down in case a fox, cat or magpie investigates it. Even so, it wouldn’t surprise me if one of them doesn’t pull out the margarine tub lid to investigate.
It’s the final week of the University of York’s free online Future Learn course The Biology of Bugs, Brains and Beasts and for our ‘Beasts’ practical work, we’re using a homemade tracking to tunnel to discover – if it works – whether we’ve got rodents or hedgehogs in our back garden.
I’ve slotted two cut-down 4-pint plastic milk bottles to make the tunnel. Our long-handled stapler came in useful here.
I then covered the tunnel in black sugar paper because small mammals prefer darker places to forage. Black plastic would have been more weatherproof, but I had the sugar paper to hand.
Finally, using one of the milk bottle tops which I’d saved, I baited the tunnel with organic peanut butter and a few sunflower hearts from the bird feeder. That should be more than enough to tempt any passing rodent.
The sponge is soaked in green food dye and hopefully, in the morning, I’ll see a few small footprints on the paper. I’ve left it in the quietest part of the garden at the back of my little meadow area, in the long grass near the hedge. A small hole amongst the grasses at the far end of the tunnel might well be a vole hole.
Links
How to make a tracking tunnel, backyard conservation with Ana.
Still enjoying our broad beans and concocting new recipes every day. With beans and mint fresh from the garden, this is a perfect summer lunch.
3 cups broad beans, podded
1 small courgette, grated
2 spring onions, chopped
4 sun-dried tomatoes, cut into small pieces
4 tablespoons chopped mint
4 thickish slices of sourdough
1 clove garlic, peeled
Cook beans in microwave with dessert spoonful of water for three minutes. Drain and let cool, then slip off the outer skins.
Using a little olive oil (we used the oil from the jar of sun-dried tomatoes) sauté onions, grated courgette and sun-dried tomatoes for two minutes. Add broad beans and mint, stir together and warm them through.
Brush both sides of the slices of sourdough with olive oil and cook on a ridged griddle pan until toasted on both sides. Rub each piece of toast with the garlic.
Pile on the bean mixture and drizzle with a little balsamic vinegar.
Today’s colander from the veg beds: broad beans, dwarf French beans, onions, beetroot (we sometimes use the tops like spinach) and courgettes.
Barbara is using a recipe in the latest, August, edition of Healthy Food Guide, ‘Spicy chicken kebabs with sweet potato wedges’ as a starting point but substituting whatever is available in the garden today, so Maris Bard potato wedges instead of sweet potato and beans instead of cucumber.
In Friday’s Gardeners’ World, BBC2, Frances Tophill mentioned that she’d been growing sweet potatoes in her greenhouse, so we might try that next year. Sweet potatoes might stand up to us neglecting them for a week when we head off for the Dales better than our cucumber and tomato plants did.
We didn’t plant tomatoes this year after two or three years of them being shrivelled in searing summer heat when we went away but in Healthy Food Guide, Jennifer Irvine suggests that it’s still not too late to grow a few:
“Experienced gardeners reading this are probably rolling their eyes, thinking that if you wanted to plant tomatoes you should have done it months ago. If you’re growing from seed, that’s true. But there is no shame in leap-frogging straight to a young tomato plant at this time of year.”
She suggests begging, bartering or – what we’ll do – buying a plant or two from our local garden centre. They can go on producing fruit until October, so it would be worth giving it a try.
As I was trimming the hawthorn at the end of the garden this morning, I found this gall on a stem growing in the top of the hedge. I think that it’s a species of rust fungus, so the tufts are the spore-producing bodies.
It looks as if the stem might have been bent over and damaged along one side, allowing the fungus to penetrate the periderm: the corky outer layer of the stem.
As I was weeding the bottom veg bed this morning, this common toad wandered along past me, heading for the greenhouse. I persuaded it to go back towards the shade and shelter of the compost bins.
To get to the veg bed, I’d trimmed a path along the edge of my meadow. I then continued alongside the hedge to the bench in the far corner. I was all set to trim back the whole meadow but as I started on the long grass in the shade of the hedge at the bottom of the garden I started coming across a lot of wildlife: two frogs hopping away from me, one white plume moth and a drone fly.
I’m leaving that area for the wildlife apart from snipping off the tops of the chicory, which I’m trying to keep in check to give other wild flowers a chance.
The first of the month seems like a good time to try to get back to drawing from nature, even if that’s just fifteen minutes by the duck pond while Barbara, her sister and brother take a walk around the walled garden here in Thornes Park. When the resting Canada goose eventually got up, it limped along awkwardly, struggling to drag along its left leg. Even though it had stayed put as people walked within yards of it, it was continually looking around, so I found myself drawing its head from three different angles. As usual, adding a bit of watercolour helped bring things together as I picked out one of the outlines.
Adding the chocolate brown to the black-headed gull sketches also makes a difference, as did adding a wash of light grey – raw umber and french ultramarine – for its back.
2 p.m., Broad beans and rainbow chard are doing well in the bed at the back of the car park by the Cluntergate Community Centre, Horbury. The blue flowers of borage are attracting a hoverfly.
As I draw, I can hear the clack of heels in the centre as couples dance to what sounds like a karaoke version of ‘Putting on the Style’. As I sit on the corner of an old stone wall, I’m attracting attention because I’m NOT moving:
‘Are you all right?’ A woman asks me.
‘Fine, thank you.’ I reply, trying to work out if it’s someone that I know.
‘I was watching you and you weren’t moving’, she explains, ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’
I’m so pleased with our potato patch. I usually try to cram in more than recommended to save space in the veg beds. This year I gave them the recommended space, which meant that I was able to earth them up when the first shoots appeared. I was expecting small new potatoes but two of these would be large enough to bake. As far as I remember, they’re a variety of Maris. They have red markings and the flesh is white and doesn’t fall in the water (i.e. start to disintegrate) when you boil them.
Another success that is that I’ve managed to grow a lot of Calendulas for free. There were perhaps two hundred little seedling clustered around where a single self-sown plant had grown last year. I grew them on by planting them in rows in the veg bed and I’ve since moved them on to any space that needs filling, in the border, the raised bed and even around the runner beans in the veg beds.
Thinking ahead to our apple crop, I’ve made a start on thinning out the little apples to just two per cluster. Both cordon apples – the golden spire and howgate wonder – suffered from leaf curl this spring but they seem to be recovering and hopefully we’ll have as good a crop as we had last year.
Borrowing scenery is a theme in Japanese gardens, Monty Don explained in the second of two films on BBC2 yesterday. Because of the topography of the country, space is usually limited, so skilful planting and pruning can give the impression that a garden extends to the trees on the slope beyond. Presenting gardens as a work of art, the experience of strolling along paths through cloud-pruned shrubs or crossing stepping-stones might feel like browsing through a scroll painting of mountain, river and forest. Alternatively, a particular, carefully constructed view might be framed by the open wall of teahouse – a picture window on a grand scale – as if it were a single painting.
My niece Sarah and husband Will have managed something similar in their orangery extension on the back of the house. It’s been almost like summer today so we had the windows wide open with a view of three wood pigeons relaxing in the trees beyond the garden fence. Drawing them, with a pot of tea and a bacon sandwich to keep me going, thank you for that Sarah, as we caught up with my brother and his wife, made for a suitably English take on the Japanese zen garden ideal of contemplating nature from the calm surroundings of a teahouse. Calm because of I refused my great nephew Zach’s offer to act as goalie for him.
The three wood pigeons didn’t seem to have any pressing business to attend to. I’d noticed a wood pigeon this morning twisting a twig from the top branches of a silver birch but these three weren’t in nest-building mode. One of them indulged in a relaxed preening routine the other two just sat hunched up close to each other, watching the world go by.
