Here’s a preview of my July Wild Yorkshire diary for the Dalesman, that’s July 2020 because after three months of work concentrating on my articles, I’ve finally got to the stage where I’m a whole twelve months ahead of schedule.
This article will describe a visit the Wakefield Naturalists’ Society made to Staveley Yorkshire Wildlife Trust nature reserve earlier this month. Migrants included black-tailed godwits heading south for the winter and painted lady butterflies still heading north for the summer. We also had our best ever views of sedge warbler and reed warbler from one of the hides on East Lagoon, which are built on raised platforms so that you can see down into the reed bed.
We saw common spotted orchid and one of the outstanding specialities of Staveley, the marsh helleborine but we didn’t spot the less conspicuous common twayblade. Something to look out for when we’re next there.
Designed in Clip Studio Paint using my desktop iMac, plus graphics pad, drawn in Procreate on my iPad Pro.
In week two, ‘Brains’ of the University of York’s The Biology of Bugs, Brains and Beasts course, for our homework we’ve been asked to get our neurones and synapses working by trying to memorise Pi. They give us the ratio to a hundred digits but in my comic strip mnemonic I’ve gone for the first fourteen:
3.14159265358979
I have a habit of looking for dates when I’m memorising numbers, so the first four digits 1415 set the historical period for me. I did actually have a Welsh granny, Anne Jones, from a Welsh-speaking family in Connah’s Quay, so for the ‘9’ I decided to go for ‘Nain’, pronounced ‘nine’, the Welsh for granny.
To really make this work as a memory-jogger, I’d have to try and bring in all my senses when remembering this story: the buzz of angry bees, the sweet scent of the meadow flowers, the texture of the old gate as it creaks open. It’s important to get a flow going for the story because I need to remember the numbers in a particular order. It’s different to one of those memory games where you’re asked to remember a collection of random objects in any order.
I crammed four digits into the final frame. At this rate, to remember one hundred digits, I’d end up with graphic novel seven or eight pages long. In case I ever need to know the ratio of Pi to fourteen decimal places, I should be able to remember by thinking back to the comic strip but, more usefully, I’ve enjoyed getting back into drawing on my iPad, which I’ve taken a bit of break from over the last three months.
It’s day five for my ginger beer plant and by now the naturally-occurring yeast and the bacteria that I added on the skins of the sultanas should have started bubbling away. There were just one or two bubbles yesterday morning, so I decided to leave it until today before adding the first additional feed of two teaspoons of sugar and one of ground ginger.
There’s definitely been a lot of activity as there’s what looks like a microbial mat a centimetre deep at the bottom of the jar but at the top, those little islands look as if they’re going mouldy so I wonder if the mixture has died and turned ‘sour’.
Hopefully, now that its been fed, it will start bubbling away. The mixture so far smells exactly like old-fashioned ginger beer.
Pencil drawing of the pottery room, which was at the far, top end of a now-demolished range of buildings behind Batley School of Art. Here I’m looking out towards the far end. As far as I remember, a long work bench and the kilns were on the right. In the previous year the workshop had moved here from one of two huts across the road.
Looking for a suitable bowl to stand my ginger beer plant in yesterday afternoon, I remembered these bowls that I threw on the wheel at Batley School of Art in 1969 and I brought them down from the attic.
These were the rejects; somewhere I’ve got one bowl which was slightly more successful but my ultimate ambition had been to make a teapot. Mr MacAdam, our ceramics tutor, talked me through the process, which involved throwing a spout separately and attaching that with slip (watered-down clay) to the teapot. He was keen that the handle should appear to grow naturally from the pot.
Unfortunately I never got that far. Several, if not all of these bowls, were originally intended to be teapots but they wobbled on the wheel and, in order to salvage something from my efforts, I cut them down and repurposed them.
I had some limited success with mugs. You can drink from them, but my idea of randomly blotching them with manganese powder didn’t work: they just look as if someone with blue powder paint on their hands has picked them up.
But I do like the glaze on these bowls, I just wish that I’d used the same glaze on the mugs. Mr MacAdam keep a grey, A4 hardback, which he referred to as his ‘Dirty Book’, to keep a record of recipes for glazes that he tried. He claimed that he could always tell which students had done life drawing by the shapes of the pots they threw on the wheel.
I treasured a demonstration mug which Mac made to demonstrate the process. There were subtle features, like a sharper edge on the inside of the rim to prevent tea dribbling down the outside of the mug. I used the mug right through college but sadly it got broken decades ago.
I’ve started a Futurelearn online course about ‘Bugs, Brains and Beasts’ and, as our practical work for week one, we’ve been asked to conduct an experiment in microbiology: to start brewing a batch of ginger beer.
We’ve put five ingredients into the ginger beer ‘plant’: lemon juice, lemon zest, sugar, ground ginger and, to provide the yeast for the fermentation process, five sultanas. The yeast and bacterium needed for the process occur naturally on the skin of grapes. If all goes well, the yeast Saccharomyces florentinus and the bacterium Lactobacillus higardii should start bubbling away during the next seven days. I’ll feed them daily on ground ginger and sugar.
Monument to the textile industry in the town square.
It’s now fifty years this summer since I left Batley School of Art and it must now be twenty since I attended a one-off reunion there so I couldn’t resist taking a look at the old place while Barbara made a start on the shopping at Tesco’s this morning. I was hoping that I might find it open for this year’s final show but the art school moved to Dewsbury some years ago and the building now houses the Cambridge Street Muslim boys only secondary school.
The upstairs room on the left with the huge east-facing window and the skylight running along the apex of the roof was the life room. Below that, immediately to the left of the main entrance, was the office of the principal, Mr Smethurst, and, to the right of the entrance, the admin office for essentials such as buying your ticket for dinner (plus a separate ‘SWEET’ ticket for the pudding!) in the college canteen.
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.
No, I didn’t really go to Hardangerfjord to draw this jug but I needed a grassy backdrop so I reached for the Tui Lakes and Mountains brochure that was on the top of a pile on my desk.
I didn’t have much success photographing the minnows in the jug but I used this blurry shot as the basis for my drawing.
I needed an illustration of the results of a childrens’ river-dipping expedition in Wensleydale for a forthcoming article in the Dalesman. On a perfect summer’s morning in August last year my sister’s grandchildren netted dozens of minnows and a stone loach in the River Ure. The fish were all released before we headed back to the holiday cottages for lunch.
