Rural Life

Day 29 of 30 Days Wild - it's damp in the One Acre Wood

Not today, as I have either been chained to my computer or out at yoga, getting within 4 inches of touching my feet with my forehead, but yesterday, we got to the One Acre Wood for a walk after working on the plot.

Often at this time of year, it is cool and dry in the wood, with the air full of insects.  Sadly, as everywhere else, there are fewer insects in the wood, which is a shame.  Because of the recent rain, it was very damp underfoot and quite humid.  There is a beautiful bit of moss on the rustic bench by the upper seasonal pool (currently empty).

Further down the way, and looking through the trees it felt a bit like a temperate rain forest, although it isn't.

And every good forest has to have its monsters, this is ours.  They really are so unpleasant to look at, these monster orange slugs, but I tolerate them, as if the giant orange slugs are out and about, there is a chance that we will get mushrooms later in the year.  No scientific basis, just observation over the 15 years we have had the wood.

Apologies for this being so late in the evening - I'll bet you have nightmares about our Orange chum!

 

Day 23 of 30 Days Wild - a series of crimes

I have crimes to report - trespass, criminal damage, vandalism!

Here is the victim - one of 10 fine, strong tomato plants, tall and vigorous and doing really really well, but not any more.  She is now naked and despoiled.

Her days are in danger - I don't think she will survive.  But the culprit left clues behind them, in the shape of good old fashioned footprints - or should I say hoof prints?

Basically, we failed to bolt the gate to the garden at the Shack, so a deer mooched around, through the gate and into the garden.  Naturally it made straight for the vegetable patch, and decided to try eating tomato (clearly it didn't like potatoes, courgette or squash plants, garlic or shallots).  It pulled all the leaves off, but left most on the ground, it shredded the stem for no good reason and left these three aborted and without hope.

In future we will be very sure the gate is bolted.  Deer are a pain, not just for the gratuitous damage they do, but also because they spread ticks around and I really don't like ticks.

 

Day 21 of 30 Days Wild - a soggy one

Full marks to those who spotted that the mystery bug yesterday was a leaf katydid - news to me!

The moon changes today and with it should come a change in the weather from the British Depression Nadine to something more akin to summer - apparently by Wednesday, temperatures will be up near 30ºC.  That will be more appealing to this lavender, which today had a few bumblebees and the odd hummingbird hawkmoth on it, but nothing to what we would expect when the sun is out and the fragrance dominates the area.

As there was a gusty wind this morning as well, it was difficult to get a good close up of a bumblebee - I took about 12 but this is the only one that was even vaguely in focus!

The promised hot weather will do wonders to the early season figs which are to be found in abundance at the moment but are distinctly not ripe.  Bizarrely with the late season ones, I find hurling abuse at them (verbal abuse) seems to ensure they start ripening pronto.  I may have to try that this week with some of these!

Other trees are showing promise of future fruitfulness - I've shown chestnut flowers before, but this bunch show the mix of male (long, fluffy and droopy) and female flowers (more upright and not fluffy) which mean that with favourable winds and insects, there will be lots of lovely chestnuts in October.

Even later than the chestnuts are the medlars - a curious fruit that is really only nice to eat raw once it is rotten, although I gather you can make a good jelly with them before they get to that state.  These won't be ready until November, and should be bletted in time for Christmas to go nicely with a bit of Stilton.  They should get a bit bigger as this tree produces a nice size fruit about the size of a walnut.

Yoga tomorrow - really!  The hall has been reopened, so there is no issue of rain stopping yoga (which is why the weather will improve tomorrow), so there will either be a late blog or none at all - you have been warned!

 

Day 20 of 30 Days Wild - if only I could add sound!

It wasn't just that Friday evening is beer o'clock time, but also that I knew that yesterday would be hyper dull, which made me miss a day with the blog, but most people seemed to get the message from the number of hits.

This morning as I went out to the market, I noticed poppies flowering around the steps to the front door - clearly we are slovenly as they should have been grubbed out weeks ago, but actually a blaze of red poppies is such a cheerful thing, I'm glad we hadn't.  Not sure what the neighbours think though!

The Moroccans were back in the market, which was good news.  Not such good news was falling over in the street (sober!) and hurting my knee and ankle - the knee is now fine, but the ankle is starting to look unpleasant.  However it isn't so bad that I can't go mowing, which I did this afternoon.  Once it was all done, I went for a walk round the lake while the mower cooled down so I could pack it away under its covers.  The carp were leaping which is fun but slightly scary to watch and impossible to photograph.  While I stood on the bank waiting for them to do it again, a frog chorus started up - I'm not fluent but I think it was along the lines of "That one's injured, if we work together, we can take it down - hooman for dinner team!"  I recorded it, but haven't worked out how to get the recording off the phone and onto here.

Finally as I checked emails before doing this blog, I found a lovely present from a chum in the States in the shape of this photo.  I've no idea exactly what it is, I assume some form of cricket, but he is totally correct in describing it as a leaf with an eye!

La vie est belle!

 

Day 9 of 30 Days Wild - I said I might not post yesterday!

The weather was not propitious yesterday for outdoor yoga, but it was good for getting a lot of work done on the computer and by the time I had finished, I just wanted to rest my eyes.  Later in the evening I went out and photographed the rainbow.

Today I have been over to Chinon, which has a very fine chateau that you can see from the house there.

The walled garden has red valerian growing in it, which attracts the butterflies - we saw whites, a peacock, and this which I think is a White Admiral.  And yes, I do know it is sitting on a pink rose, but it started out on the valerian.

 

We also went wine tasting and buying at Restigné again - all very good!

Tomorrow I may be more verbose, but I still have 50 e-mails to read before bedtime!

 

Day 7 of 30 Days Wild - more on large green lizards

The rain held off this morning so we were able to get to the kitchen garden at the Shack to do some essential work.  I cleared out the broad beans - I've got a bag full of beans to pod and turn into old bean and garlic purée.  A couple of the garlic were innocent bystanders in last week's digging event, and need to be used, so it will be all home grown bar the oil.  I also planted yet another butternut squash, as one potato did not come up - presumably got eaten by mice.  I also started to set up the bean frame for borlotti beans and sowed 8 stations.  Not the easiest bean poles to get into place - the bamboos themselves have been "harvested" from clients who have bamboo growing at theirs - there is an art to drying bamboo, particularly the thick ones, and we haven't yet mastered it.  Then there is the soil - clay with builders' rubble from over the past 200 years - not easy to bang poles into, not easy to sow into and full of cracks, fissures, tile and brick fragments and the odd fossilised oyster.  Hopefully the beans will like it though.

Donald tried to help, but the siren call of cuddles with John was too much for him - it's a lurve thing!

Clause, on the other hand, is in disgrace.  After John had done more mowing, and I had put him down twice, once after cuddles sitting on a chair, once with him riding around on my back while I cut down beanstalks, like some maharajah on an elephant, he went off in a huff.  The next thing I know, he has pounced on something and is playing with it.  I went to see what he had found and had to shoo him off another large green lizard.  He was distracted by the still thrashing and separate tail for long enough for me to photograph the main bit of lizard, find a trowel, scoop the poor thing up and fling it into the scrub.  Lizards are not good cat food.  I suspect that he was guilty of the other one too.  He had a long lecture on not eating endangered or rare species, and certainly not eating a (potentially) breeding pair.  He ignored me.

Finally, before going home for a well earned and late lunch, we went to check out another client's garden.  There I got mesmerised by the most beautiful demoiselle I've ever seen - cobalt blue for most of its body length with a blob of bright cerulean blue at the end of its tail.  This is the best photo I managed and doesn't do it justice.

Yoga restarts tomorrow, in the open air (!), so the blog will be late or non-existent, depending on how well I manage to recover from trying to force my body into positions it is not lithe and slim enough to achieve.

 

Day 6 of 30 Days Wild - and a return to civilisation

Once yesterday's blog was filed, we returned to our Friday night routine and went to the pub to see off the working week.  It had been 11 weeks since the last visit we think, and we had moved from late winter/early spring to summer, so we could sit out on the terrace and not freeze (even though there was a bit of a wind).  It was good to be back - carry on the good work, Vinz and Steff at Excalibur!

Of course they are not the only ones opening up and in Baugé today I noticed that one road had been blocked off to allow the restaurant and pizzeria space to have people outside on new terraces too.

On the wild side of things, my review of photos showed that I had managed to capture quite a few butterflies, including a couple on chestnut flowers and even more marbled whites.  So I'll keep my blurb short today and let the butterflies do the talking.

 

Day 5 of 30 Days Wild - butterflies

OK so I said I would be late, as the pub reopens, but that only works if John is home from work.  He is toiling so I will do my blog and you can see pretty pictures from the terrace tomorrow!

The sweet chestnut is now well and truly in flower around here - probably about 2 weeks earlier than usual.  The insects are gorging themselves on the nectar - although as it has gone a bit cool, there weren't as many honeybees knocking around as I thought there would be.  Once client has a very nice, small and young tree which was just covered in flowers.

Looking more closely at a bunch of flowers, I found a butterfly.

There is a cherry tree at the far side of the wildflower meadow, which has fruit which is just about ripe, except the birds are going at it and the heavy rain a couple of days ago bruised the fruit badly, causing rot and also causing some to ferment inside.  I ate a lot straight from the tree but there was no point in picking them to bring home as they would be rotten by tomorrow.

There are all sorts of flowers in the meadow at the moment and a mix of scabious and knapweed seems to make it an ideal habitat for marbled white butterflies.  There were loads flying around every time I moved.  I got a few photos but this is the only one I've done anything with so far.  Very pretty, isn't it?

And now I can no longer resist the siren song of the pub terrace - cheers!

 

Day 1 of 30 Days Wild - and any Deconfinement excitement too!

Actually there isn't really any deconfinement excitement today, and probably not until Friday, when Beer O'clock at the Pub is restored to us - yeh!

I have worked for a few Wildlife Trusts over the past 6 years or so, and have always admired their 30 Days Wild campaign in June, so this year I've signed up, and will use the blog to share my daily dose of Wild - as well as any deconfinement excitement.

Two Wild Things for today.  This morning we went to the One Acre Wood to start preparing for next winter (as summer starts today for the meteorologists), by felling one of the large dead trees dotted around.  That was not particularly wild, but I have to say, it was a pretty text book felling.  What was lovely was standing under one of the great oaks in the wood and looking up at the branches and leaves.  Light patterns have changed this year as the parcel next to ours was completely felled in early January, but looking up a trunk like this is always a lovely thing to do.

The other wild thing is a bit ickie, but I have expurgated it.  I found half a lizard at the vegetable plot.  At first I blamed the country boy cats for having had a snack and not having finished it, but actually cats don't much like eating lizards, they just play with them.  The remains were under a large birch tree which is used by a variety of birds (crow family and raptors) as a good place to sit and watch for anything and also to eat any prey they might have found and flown off with.  So I'm blaming a raptor of some sort for the demise of this very beautiful lizard.  Whole and alive I think it would be 8 to 10 inches long, perhaps even a foot, and very dramatic.

What will Day 2 bring?

 

Day 7 of Deconfinement Diary - meeting some new helpers

Before I show you the newbies, a couple of pictures of old favourites.  First question is how many chickens can a small man trap they constructed actually hold?  Chickens don't seem to do social distancing, well apart from Bridie the Bantam who keeps well away from the Big Four when they are out and about.  So we found out last night, one small chicken underneath (no need to breathe for most of the incident it appeared), plus one big, fat Light Sussex (was a breed ever worse named - she is nearly goose size!).  The astonishing thing was that this double layer of chicken in a hole lasted for over half an hour!

Our latest previously owned ride-on lawnmower is currently having its blade plate welded, so we get to keep the grass collector that goes with it in the garden.  It is seriously large!  The hedgehog, Nibbles and, this morning, Poirot all think it is a great place for sunbathing - here modelled by Poirot.

This morning we were back to the vegetable plot to get the third courgette plant, four more butternut squashes and the 20 surviving sweetcorn seedlings into proper ground.  I lifted a piece of weed suppressant matting that had been protecting the soil and the horse poo we spread there in the autumn, and tried turning the soil.  That particular patch is about 70% clay I think so it was hard work, but the sweetcorn are planted and I am hoping that the broad beans provide a bit of shelter and a lot of fixed nitrogen in the soil as their roots spread out.

As I worked my way down the row and lifted more of the matting I met Sid first of all.  I don't know who was more surprised, but once uncovered he didn't seem too keen on going back under the matting.  Nor did he seem too keen on going towards the broad beans, probably as there was a cat on the other side of the beans.  I the end I moved him down to the bottom of the row, knowing I wasn't going to go that far.  Anyway, introducing Sid, the baby grass snake!  If he was a foot long in total I'd be surprised.

As I carried on turning back the matting I found the reason Sid didn't want to go back under, as I found Terry sitting and getting very cross with me for having lifted the mat, moved Sid further away, and then I wouldn't just go away and leave him alone.  He eventually pottered off under his own steam, but he wasn't too chuffed.  He was also very well disguised, so I really only spotted him because he moved.  There were some lovely Terry-sized snails further down the mat, so he should have had a good lunch once we left him to it.

It's ever so nice to meet the neighbours!