Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
This is not the ideal way to grow peppers. I took some seed from a red pepper in early spring, dried it, then planted it in garden soil from the greenhouse. First to germinate were garden weeds, mainly chickweed but also red deadnettle, spurge and what I think is nipplewort.
The pepper seedlings are now looking yellow and undernourished, so it’s time for me to pot them on and give them a chance to grow, flower and fruit.
Even at the lowest magnification of 10x, you can see the cells in this chickweed leaf, which is just one centimetre from base to tip.
Zooming in to 60x you can see how the cells line up to make structures, along the vein and the edge of the leaf.
At 200x there’s isn’t much depth of field but it looks to me as if there’s a single line of cells forming a tube along the edge of the leaf.
These were taken on a Traveler USB microscope, which I bought in 2009 at Aldi’s. The software that came with it is long out of date, so it’s taken a bit of ingenuity by my computer expert friend Martin to find a workaround to get it working on my iMac, via a virtual Windows 10 installation.
Under the Microscope my Wild West Yorkshire nature diary for 20 September 2009.
These lush weeds grow in a corner of the cold frame. As I draw, there’s a confrontation between two pairs of magpies with a lot of irate clacking. They meet on our chimney and two of the rivals lock feet together and roll down the roof tiles. The dispute moves on to the next door neighbour’s roof and, as I pack in, 
I can see them in the top of one of the ash trees in the wood, joined by at least two more magpies and a carrion crow who seems to be just an onlooker.
CHICKWEED is bursting into life on flowerbeds, covering entire beds where it gets the chance. 
It’s an annual but it has the ability to overwinter and get ahead of the competition as spring arrives.
A wagtail trots about on a house roof in the morning sun.
In contrast to this waterside bird heading for the houses, a regular garden bird, a male 
blackbird, is down on the sandy bank by the river near a pair of mallards that are dabbling nearby.
Still no sign of frogs in our pond but that’s hardly surprising as despite the sun it’s still too cold. A neighbour across the road has a tiny pond that always attracts too many frogs and we transfer the spawn to my pond but the clump that had appeared there before the snow has now turned white, killed off by the heavy frosts.
This weekend will be the test as at last the warm air will be able to move in from the south-west. I’m anxious to see the frogs return.