Category: Garden

Animal Tracking Tunnel

Tracking tunnel
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.

assembling the tunnel

I’ve slotted two cut-down 4-pint plastic milk bottles to make the tunnel. Our long-handled stapler came in useful here.

covering the tunnel

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.

baiting the trap with peanut butter

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.

The Future Learn Biology of Bugs, Brains and Beasts course run by the biosciences department of the University of York

Broad Bean and Courgette Bruschetta

broad bean bruschetta

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.

Courgettes and Beetroot

vegetables
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.

recipe

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.

Links

Healthy Food Guide

Jennifer Irvine

Hawthorn Rust Fungus

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.

gall

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.

Common Toad


toad

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.

Duck Pond

duck pond sketches

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.

The Zen of Watching Wood Pigeons

Wood pigeons

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.

wood pigeons

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.

Lurking

lurking

The birds on our feeders are having a hard time with the sparrowhawk swooping in regularly and this character, a neighbour’s cat with a bushy tail, lurking in the flower bed. Even the pheasants keep their distance when the cat is around, although they don’t seem too concerned about the sparrowhawk.

Sparrow Nestbox

Photographed, then drawn (well, I admit it, traced!) and coloured in Clip Studio Paint, on my iPad Pro, using an Apple Pencil.

First visitor to our new sparrow nest box: a blue tit. It checks out hole number three first; no, that’s not quite right; then hole number two and it’s just about to investigate hole number one when a second blue tit appears, there’s a skirmish and off they fly.

It’s likely that, as this RSPB box was made specifically for sparrows, the blue tits will find the entrance hole a little too wide for their liking but the old box, single-holed variety, attracted blue tits one year, sparrows the next (and finally bumblebees), so we’ll have to wait until springtime to find out who finally takes possession.

Link

RSPB sparrow terrace nestbox

Autumn Trim

A cold front came in from the north during the night and today it’s noticeably cooler but mostly sunny.

golden hornetArmed with secateurs, long-handled loppers, a step-ladder and a pruning saw, I trim back the golden hornet crab apple to a more manageable shape. It’s mainly a case of cutting back the whip-like vertical shoots that have grown since I last cut it back a year ago but I put in a bit of extra effort and use a pruning saw on one branch that’s managed to get its twiggy offshoots beyond my reach during the past few years.

long-tailed titYes, it was a favourite look-out post for the resident blackbird, but it will soon find another perch. As I work at in the crown of a the tree, a long-tailed tit flits past my head and perches on a branch three feet in front of me. I don’t think it quite knows what to make of me.