Category: Garden

Nest Robber

A COMMOTION before breakfast; six Blackbirds and a Mistle Thrush are gathered in what looks to me like indignant rage around a Magpie on the back lawn which is down at the edge of the pond, attacking a plump nestling, pecking at its head. I know that I should no more wish that Magpies wouldn’t take the chicks from ‘our’ back garden nests than I should wish that Osprey’s shouldn’t swoop on trout or that lions shouldn’t attack zebras but it’s difficult not to feel involved as this turns out to be chick from a Blackbird’s nest in the Ivy behind our herb bed.

We’ve been following the progress of the parents’ nest-building and feeding from the kitchen window, only yards from the nest. They’ve been busy over the past few days shuttling in a supply of worms and insects.

Deciding that it would be too late to rescue this chick anyway, I leave the garden birds to sort it out between themselves.

But, after breakfast, when I go down the garden to open the greenhouse, I discover a second chick. It looks like a miniature oven-ready chicken, naked, plump and bleary-eyed, with a row of plastic-looking quills along its stubby wings. Only it’s parents could love it. It’s got a spot of blood near the base of its bill but is otherwise unscathed. The Magpie must have been disturbed before this chick suffered the fate of its sibling, which the Magpie carried off down to the vegatable beds to finish eating.

I put my head into the Ivy and with some difficulty spot the nest, on a twining branch on the far side of the hedge. With a stick I poke away the remains of a third chick, hanging over the nest from a twig, which the Magpie had evidently killed in its attempt to make off with it.

I retrieve the surviving chick from the lawn and place it so that it’s as comfortable as it can be in the nest. It’s still warm and, I guess, healthy enough.

I’m anxious that the parents will have desserted the nest but by the end of the afternoon they’re back again, so it looks as if they’ve found the youngster. A day later male and female are still taking turns to pop in with food so it looks as if the Magpie hasn’t been back . . . so far.

The Eyes of the Potato

 I’VE DRAWN these Desirée red maincrop potatoes with a size no. 111 Tower Pen nib that I used when I drew my new art-bag the other day in non-waterproof ink; a sepia calligraphy writing ink from the Manuscript Pen company of Highley, Shrophshire. This flows more smoothly than Indian ink but the disadvantage is that I don’t now have the option of adding a watercolour wash to my drawing – not unless I’m prepared to see my line-work run unpredictably into the watercolour, which in this case is not the effect that I’m after.

I’m in a mood where I yearn for a bit of inky precision in my life after what has often seemed like a long nebulous period.

Chitting

I’m chitting these Desirées; this involves leaving the tubers in a light, airy but not too warm place to encourage the growth of sturdy new sprouts from the eyes of the potato. While this isn’t essential for a maincrop variety it is a way of celebrating the stirring of new life and the welcome return of spring.

Bins and Butts

THE TROUBLE with having a big cut-back in the garden is that you end up with a big pile of trimmings, but it isn’t quite as bad as it looks; two thirds of that pile is material from the old compost bins (right) which I now need to put back in the new, much-improved version which we’ve constructed behind the greenhouse.

Now would be a good time to start a crop of mixed salad leaves in the greenhouse, which we’d take out in about two months time when the tomato plants will go in.

I should also be able to whittle down the quantity of black plastic water-tanks that are lying around at the end of the garden; the existing water-butts connected to downpipes from the roofs of the house, the greenhouse and the shed should provide enough rainwater for all but the driest summers.

Chairs

I have been drawing recently but you wouldn’t know it from my sketchbook; these are all I have to show for the last week or two. I’ve been drawing the maps for Walks Around Ossett in the odd hours I’ve had between family matters and parcelling up my books. Parcelling up books and shipping them out to customers never seems like real work – it’s therapeutic but hardly taxing – but it is, after all, the way I make my living, so I shouldn’t grumble!

I think that I can see a patch of calm, clear water ahead but at the moment I really feel as if I’m swimming against a backwash and getting nowhere and that is reflected in this handful of sketches:

  • a couple of people at the Wakefield Naturalists’ meeting on Tuesday
  • a newspaper drawn when I waited to have my hair cut last week
  • two chair backs

The chairs are entirely typical of my unsettled life at present; I started drawing one chair then got moved on after I’d drawn two lines then – at my next port of call – I’d no sooner started drawing a second chair when someone came along and moved it!

Rhubarb Rootstock

Finally, this afternoon, after a morning painting scenery and an afternoon at a farm shop event, I got the best part of an hour to sketch. As it was a Rhubarb Festival event the most appealing subject to hand was a basket of forced rhubarb and an example of the rootstock from which the shoots are grown, at this time of year, in total darkness to ensure an early crop, at a time of year when there is a break in the supply of soft fruits.

The Cat & Clothes Line

Barbara shouted up to me ‘Just take a look at that cat on the lawn!’

It’s been a wild day, wild but mild; this morning our neighbour’s three-year old boy got blown over in a gust on the way to school and the handful of stallholders who turned up at Ossett Market were sent home because of the danger of goods and even stalls being blown around. I felt particularly sorry for the fishmonger with all his fresh fish, having to pack up his van. We’ve had a lot of rain too and the Calder is running beige-brown and flowing up over the bridge piers but not quite at flood level yet.

But some are enjoying the call of the wild; the frayed end of the broken washing line (broken by blue tits pecking at it!) was snaking and jerking around on the lawn near the pond, exactly in the way that you’d tempt a kitten to chase a piece of string, but on a larger and livelier scale.

Too much of a temptation for this black and white cat which was taking it’s usual shortcut back from the meadow via our back garden path. You can see (below) that at times it turned its back on it but then thought ‘Well, just one more go . . .’

It was so happy rolling on its back, pouncing and sitting with its ‘prey’ wrapped around its shoulder. Occasionally it did pause and look around as if thinking ‘This is silly, I hope no one is watching me.’ But it still couldn’t resist another mad tussle with the playful frayed end of the rope beckoning.

I’d love to have had time to make quick sketches but the last ten days have been taken up with preparations for Barbara’s mum’s funeral on Monday. I’m not going to really settle down until after there’s been that short ceremony of closure.

Over the past weeks and months I’ve slipped further and further behind with my latest booklet, the deadline for which is looming up in the next two to three weeks, but haven’t been able to make any real progress on it.

Hills

Thanks to our relaxed but relentless attention over the past few days to essential tasks, we’re hoping to get back out in the countryside next week, not to the wilder uplands of the Pennines that I’ve fondly imagined here, but at least we should manage to get out into the more homely farmland around Ossett to check out walks for my latest booklet. This is getting increasingly urgent as I’ve promised to have it ready to launch at the Rhubarb Festival in Wakefield at the end of February.

This pagoda reminds me of the ventilation towers on whisky distilleries, which I drew, years ago,  for Steve Cribb’s book Whisky on the Rocks but I drew this from the Bakehouse Cafe in Ossett; this is the largest of three pagodas on the roof of a Victorian building which I believe was once the town’s Conservative Club but which is now a wine bar.

I like to have fresh herbs in the kitchen, which are especially welcome at this time of the year when there’s a very limited supply from the garden. By the time this Marjoram outgrows its the ceramic pot it was supplied in, spring will be here and we can plant it out in the herb bed.

I’ve enjoyed having one or two comments to my postings,  many thanks for those, but I’m having trouble with spam comments at the moment so I’ll probably have to turn off the comments (not sure how I do that at present!), to allow myself more time for the drawing and writing the diary itself. What a nuisance!

Compost Bin

The main component in this compost bin isn’t the timber or the nails; it’s the sheer intellectual effort involved!

Working with recycled timber means that you’re improvising all the time, planning which piece to use where. The only materials we bought at the local builders’ yard were two packets of galvanised nails and one sheet of outdoor plywood for the lids and one of the ‘doors’.

So is  it really worth all this effort for a compost bin?! Of course! The compost bin is at the heart of the garden, turning plant waste into valuable humus (another bonus is that at last we’ve whittled down the stack of timber that I salvaged ‘because it would be useful’ but which has been leaning against the shed for several years!)

This double bin holds 2.5 cubic yards of compost (almost 2 cubic metres) which would weigh about 1 ton (or somewhere in the region of 1000 kilograms) depending on how wet or dry it was. Imagine bringing that lot home from the garden centre! And, for that matter, think of the cost of transport if we sent our garden waste away with the local authority collection. We told them we didn’t require a bin when the scheme started but we did take them up on an offer for a recycled plastic compost bin which sits in another corner of the garden, by the shed.

I had to manhandle my mum’s compost wheelie bin down her driveway this morning so I’m well aware how heavy bulky organic matter can be.

What I don’t like about this design of compost bin:

  • it’s so large now that it shades one end of the greenhouse
  • with the lid on, the birds can’t get at it – although I’m sure the Toads will find their way to it

Covering the compost and insulating it from the weather helps speed up the composting process. This bin is double-walled with cardboard cartons acting as insulation in the cavity. When the cardboard starts to rot down, that can go into the compost too (if I can find a way of lifting it out of the narrow cavity, that is).

produceIt’s unfortunate that the compost will be out of bounds to birds in future but at least the Robin got a chance to hop around the disturbed ground as we worked today, almost under our feet.

We’re going to have some amazing crops of vegetables from the compost this bin will produce!

Birds at a Glance

chaffinchThese aren’t drawings of the birds’ ‘true’, accurate appearance – it would be easier to study a bird book for an authoritative version of that – but they aren’t drawings of the birds as I saw them either; they’re drawings of the way I remembered the appearance of the bird after I’d looked at it for as long as possible, which wasn’t long enough, through binoculars.

This way of drawing varies from my normal approach where I look and look and look again, building up a drawing from dozens, probably hundreds, of little observations. blackbirdThat’s not an option with most of the birds in our garden. I took mental notes of shape and colour during my one lingering look at each bird and then tried to stick to that, rather than revert to the familiar picture of, say, a Blackbird, that I might already carry in my mind.

I gave myself license not to worry if the final drawing didn’t look all that much like the bird. As I say, I could have referred to a bird book if that had been my aim but these are the colours and the shapes, as accurately and honestly as I could transfer them from memory to paper.

The species I drew are male Chaffinch, Starling, female and male Blackbird, Great Tit and Woodpigeon. I used an ArtPen with brown Noodler’s waterproof ink and Cotman watercolours.

Sparrows on the Shed

roofing felt x 60

This photograph looks rather like a scree-slope on a Lakeland fell but in fact each of these slate-like fragments is less than a millimetre across, smaller than the commas on this page. It’s a piece of roofing felt taken at 60x magnification through my microscope. The felt is bitumen-coated with a ‘green mineral’ finish, but it looks browner in my photograph. The flaky shapes and the colour make me guess that this is a green variety of Muscovite mica called fuchsite. The flakes (laminæ) of Muscovite are thin and surprisingly flexible, so they’re ideal as a coating on rolls of roofing felt.

There’s another mineral present; the rounded, glassy mineral near the bottom left-hand corner is a worn grain of sand, silica.

Fuchsite is rich in chromium but like other micas, as a form of silicate, it has a chemical composition based on aluminium, silica and oxygen (AlSi3O10). Micas are part of the group of minerals known as Phyllosilicates or sheet silicates, which take their name from phyllon, the Greek for leaf.

sparrows on the shedIt was sparrows pecking on our newly felted shed roof that prompted me to take a closer look at its composition. Why should sparrows feel the need to peck at flakes of mica?

Muscovite is 2-4 on the Mohs scale of hardness, depending whether you’re testing the softer ‘sides’ or the harder face of the flakes. This means that it’s somewhere between a finger-nail and a pocket-knife in hardness, so the sparrows might swallow it as a form of ‘gritting’. The flakes might be used in the bird’s gizzard to help grind down the seeds and grain that form its staple diet. Fuchsite is made of clayey minerals so it might also have medicinal properties that help with digestion, just as we’d take kaolin, a fine white clay that is another form of sheet sillicate.

sparrows on a wallSparrows will also peck at mortar on walls (right), which gives them access to more minerals; silica in the sand and the calcium carbonate in the cement.

When Paul and I put the new roofing felt I predicted that the sparrows would love it: “It’s like putting a new sheet of Tydsan in a budgie’s cage!”

Tydsan is the trade name of sheets of sandpaper, cut to size.

“Our budgies had to make do with newspaper in their cages!” Paul tells me.

Shed Roof

garden shed
Our garden shed in its heyday, painted as a sample when I was working on illustrations for Dr Hessayon's Garden Expert guides.

Paul the gardener tells me that one year he and his father decided to record all the produce they harvested from their vegetable garden, which is about the size of a tennis court. The total weight of apples, onions, potatoes, carrots, cabbages, soft fruits and so on was three-quarters of a ton!

This morning we’re re-roofing my garden shed.

garden path“That should last us out!” he suggests.

Well, I hope it doesn’t last us out but I think it’s got a chance of lasting out the twenty-year old shed itself, which is looking rather battered and weatherworn where we’ve cut back the Ivy that engulfed it.

Spot the shed! – in this photograph of the back garden (right), the Ivy-covered shed is on the right. People would walk down the path and not notice that we had a shed until they walked back up and saw the side with the door in.