Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
We’re almost at the end of the apple blossom and the embryo fruits are beginning to form. I’ll need to thin out the fruits to two per cluster and I think most growers would then recommend just keeping the best of those as they develop. If I leave five in each cluster the tree will shed several as they start to grow.
As I draw, bees, including two different species of bumble bees, and a small hoverfly are continually busy on the blossoms of our single cordon Golden Spire cooking apple. The single-stemmed seven-foot tall tree can’t possibly as many apples as there are blossoms but we can thin the little apples out to two or three per cluster and, if we don’t, it will shed a few anyway.
The hybrid limes in the Victorian gardens of Horbury are now in fresh green leaf and the apples are in blossom.
This blossom is a variety called James Grieve which is a cooker at the start of the season, an eater as it gets sweeter towards the end.
The compass and the cinema-goer were drawn in odd moments this week.
I’m keen to get drawing again but it proved to be a busy day so this drawing of apple blossom on our Howgate Wonder double cordon was drawn through the patio windows at 8.30 this evening.
Also spotted in the garden today; a jay – unusually – at the front in our neighbour’s sumac a breakfast-time, a hedgehog on the back lawn after dark and, far less welcome than either of those, a large brown rat. We stopped feeding the birds for a month or more and we thought the rats had gone but they soon homed in on the sunflower seed when we started again this weekend.
Rats are supposed to be intelligent and I can’t deny that this one was showing a great deal of ingenuity in its attempts to get to the feeders, climbing out on the edge of the wheelbarrow that I keep upended by the compost heap (I’ve moved the bird-feeders right down the garden away from the house).
When it succeeded in shinning up one of the poles, I decided that it was time to remove the feeders and I’ll try hanging them in the rowan at the front in the hope that it doesn’t find them there.
I took the chance to step out of the back door to hear the dawn chorus when I got up to make a cup of tea at quarter past five this morning. It was overcast and misty, a little before sunrise. Sound travels faster through cool, therefore denser air, so the combined songs of what seemed like a hundred birds in neighbouring gardens and the nearby wood was quite impressive. The only song that I could pick out was the blackbird, one close to the house; a mellow, melodious, unhurried song.