Category: Habitats

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.

Back to Backs

sketches
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market folk

This feels like getting back to some kind of normality: sitting with a latte at a table outside Bistro 42 overlooking Ossett’s Friday market and watching the world go by. I want to just draw what is in front of me rather than, as I often do, taking a mental snapshot of a passing figure, so I draw people who look as if they might stay in position for a few minutes. The men waiting on the bench are the most obliging. I find back views expressive. Rather than slapping a facial expression on a character, you can leave the viewer to work out for themselves whether a character is feeling relaxed or slightly; tense, bored or curious.

North Beach, Bridlington

North Beach sketch map

This marginal illustration for one of my Dalesman diaries isn’t meant to be a trail map but you couldn’t go far wrong in finding your way to Danes Dyke Nature Reserve than starting at the harbour and keeping the sea on your right. Look forward to walking it again some time. And, when they come out of lockdown, there’s always the option of catching the Land Train at Sewerby Hall to get back to the harbour in time for fish and chips.

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.

Rodley Nature Reserve

Rodley

You drive down through what feels like a factory yard, cross a small swing-bridge over the canal then cross the River Aire via a century-old 38m long Pratt truss steel bridge to reach a low-lying area of lagoons and meadows, enclosed on three sides by a meander of the river, so that being on the reserve feels like being on an island. We’re actually on the inner side of the busy Leeds Ring Road, but I feel as if I’ve got a long way away from all that rush.

As a change from my usual approach, I thought I’d launch straight into watercolour for this sketch – no pen, no pencil – which is based on a panorama that I took from one of the hides on a Wakefield Naturalists’ Society field meeting at the reserve in August this year. No field meetings at all this year, which is probably a first for the Nats since the end of World War II.

Dalesman article

This is the header image for my August Wild Yorkshire nature diary in The Dalesman.

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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Categorized as Garden

Great Brome

great brome
brome

It droops like oats and it has long awns like barley. As this is growing at the edge of a wheat field, I’m guessing that it is great brome, Anisantha diandra, although there are some similar-looking species. Great brome is a grass from the Mediterranean region which grows on waste ground, roadsides and field edges.

The Wikipedia reports that it, and a similar brome, also get referred to as ‘ripgut brome’ in some parts of the world, where the species have become troublesome weeds.

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Categorized as Farmland