Seeking sustenance

Apart from a little drizzle for a short time about 10 days ago, today we had the first rainfall since some time in the second half of June – a heavy downpour followed by a couple of hours of steady, light rain.  Whether it will make much difference to the plants remains to be seen, and I doubt if it will do much for the reservoirs; the weather has continued to be mostly very warm (including today, even in the rain), and the forecast for the next week or so is similar. 

Harvest, 1st August

Despite the heat and drought, the garden has been giving me some usable produce; the tomatoes have started turning red (or orange depending on the variety), my climbing beans ‘Blauhilde’ have started cropping, the carrots continue to do well, there are lots of blackberries in the garden and in the hedgerow across the lane, and the plum tree has also produced prolifically (now running out of steam).  Most of the plums are in good condition; I've discovered that plum moth damage causes premature ripening of the fruit, so while the early ripeners had a lot of damage, the main crop is mostly fine.  Worth remembering for future years.

The search for food has been occupying the wildlife, and I’ve had to make a few adjustments to accommodate their needs.  The fallen plums have attracted a range of visitors – a female pheasant makes a daily appearance, a juvenile pheasant has also had a peck around and a hedgehog has been seen there a few times, including in the daytime (so I assume she’s a nursing mother, as they will occasionally come foraging in the day).  I’ve been happy to leave fallen fruit for them and for the blackbirds, who also enjoy a meal there.  I haven’t cleared up all the fallen apples, for the same reason.  The fruit provides sustenance but also some liquid in this dry weather.

Blackbird scratching among my leeks

As I’ve commented previously, I’ve been netting my brassicas against cabbage white butterflies.  But when I uncovered the broccoli to cut a few heads for the kitchen, I discovered that aphids had got under the net.  The butterflies couldn’t get in, but neither could the ladybirds that have kept my broad beans clear of blackfly, nor the blue tits that have been eating the flies on the plums.  So I’ve taken the net off – the cabbage whites can’t do much damage to broccoli anyway – and put it over the leek bed, which had been mulched with compost removed from the tulip pots, and where the blackbirds had been digging enthusiastically for worms (and upending the leeks in the process).  On examining the kale, which had also been netted, I found what looked like an infestation of flea beetle that had damaged all the leaves; that net has now also been removed, and I hope that the plants can grow through the damage.  I have replacement seedlings for them anyway.

Hummingbird hawkmoth on the buddleja

The butterflies have also been looking for food; the oregano is now mostly past its peak, but the buddleja is proving a big attraction, including for hummingbird hawkmoths (this year has been good for them, apparently, although we always get a few each year).  A large cluster of plums in the plum tree, too high for us to pick, turned rotten and attracted several red admirals at a time.  While summer pruning the apple cordons, I was about to cut out the flowering stems of the symphoricarpus (snowberry) that suckers through from next door’s garden (to stop them seeding), until I noticed a pair of holly blue butterflies nectaring on the blooms.  I’ve left the snowberry for the time being, and will cut it back later.

Holly blues on the snowberry

High summer

 

Mid-July, and the weather is pleasantly warm but not stiflingly hot.  The greens in the garden are quietly starting to lose their greenness and lustre as we head towards summer’s end, but we’re not there yet.  There has still been no rain; a hosepipe ban has just been announced, not that we use one, but the media is starting to talk about drought.  Ah well.

The little pots are still being cared for at the soaking stations, and the few seeds that I’ve sown this week – salads, sprouting broccoli, spring cabbage and the like – are being looked after and watered in the greenhouse.  One little plant that has had no water at all is one of my sage cuttings.  When I investigated, I discovered that it had put down roots through the bottom of the pot and between the flagstones; there can’t be much root there as the flags are very close together, but obviously it’s getting enough moisture to survive.

Unwatered sage plant

The borlotti beans are producing pods, but the other climbing beans are still at the flower-bud stage (maybe the fact that the sparrows seem to perch on the supports has something to do with that?  Are they pecking the buds off?).  Climbing pea ‘Alderman’ has all but finished, and has suffered no pea moth damage.  I’m also pleased with my carrots, which seem to have avoided all the attentions of carrot flies; I sowed them beside the garlic and shallots (now lifted and drying off, they’ve also done well) which is supposed to help, and it does seem to have worked.

The plums, however, have not escaped damage from plum moths.  I put up a moth trap at the usual time, but it seems to have been blown askew by the wind and I think the lure has dropped out.  Most of the plums have, or have had, caterpillars in them, and the centres are having to be cut out.  It’s the time of year to do pruning of plum trees – something that I rarely do, and the tree is showing the effects of that; there’s a lot of dead wood in there, and much of the fruit, often in large unthinned clusters, is only hanging at the ends of very long bare branches.  I spent an afternoon up a ladder sawing dead branches off (and very satisfying it was too, if quite hard work), and once the fruit has finished I might shorten some of the fruiting branches.  It was pleasing to see a lot of new shoots forming on the tree, so it’s not in as bad a state as I had thought, and it should be possible to re-shape the tree to some extent. 

Plum cluster

We have had a lot of swifts flying around, at least until a couple of days ago; it looks as though they have disappeared.  I hope they’ve found somewhere to nest.  There are still good numbers of swallows and house martins.  The more terrestrial birds are enjoying the water that we’ve put out for them, both for drinking and bathing.  I have also solved a puzzle that was bothering me.  For some time I've been hearing a sort of repetitive wheezy call coming from somewhere across the road, not unlike a blackbird’s reassurance call (‘it’s only me, I’m not a threat’) but louder and more insistent.  The Merlin app tells me that it’s a stock dove; this makes sense as we’ve had a few appearing in the garden this year.  In the past I’ve tended to assume that pigeons who are not woodpigeons are racing birds, as we do get them from time to time, stopping off on their travels for food, water and a brief rest, but I’ve noticed that some birds aren’t ringed and had worked out that they must be stock doves, the ancestors of racing pigeons (and feral pigeons in towns and cities).  It’s nice to see them here.

Wilting

We’re wilting – both me and the plants.  Another very hot (for us) weekend – temperatures up to the mid-thirties Centigrade (mid-nineties Fahrenheit); and I know that won’t sound remarkable to some of you, but for us it’s not at all what we’re used to.  It’s now a little cooler, mid-twenties (around 75F) with a fresh easterly breeze keeping things manageable, but forecast to warm up again, and still no rain in the forecast for a week at least.  It doesn’t help that the problems with the village water supply are ongoing; the water company is keeping the taps flowing, but I’m trying to conserve as much water as possible.  The tomatoes are surviving, more or less, and they and the bigger pots get water mostly saved from the kitchen; there are now three soaking stations in the shade for the little pots, and plants in the ground are having to put up with nothing (except for the courgettes, which get a little but are still not producing fruits of usable size). 

Achillea and feverfew

It’s interesting to see which plants are flagging.  As you might expect, the Mediterranean ones (lavender, oregano, etc) don’t seem to mind too much, although the thyme (in pots) is looking a little crisp at the edges.  Surprisingly, the osteospermum (also in a pot) flags a bit in the heat, while the little pot of mint seems to be doing well on short water rations.  The big achillea is still going strong; it and the feverfew provided some flowers for the (rather hot) porch (the achillea will dry off, for some out-of-season colour in the winter).  The penstemons are also bearing up well, and the sunflowers in the veg patch are coming on fine (though I should have staked them as they're looking a bit bent!).  The dahlias (in pots) are trying to flower but they, and their underplanting of annuals, aren’t really doing much, and they’re also being knocked around by the wind.  I suspect that the drought damage to the plants in the ground won’t really be apparent until the autumn at the earliest.

A fine display of dill flowers

In the veg plot, the garlic has been lifted – it looks surprisingly good, considering that I haven't watered it – and the broad beans and most of the peas eaten or cut and frozen before they dried off on the plants.  The ‘Alderman’ peas are good, and pest-free; ‘Douce de Provence’ produced nice petit pois but some pods had been attacked by pea moth.  ‘Alderman’ was sown a little later, and perhaps that had something to do with it?  There's a fine display of dill flowers.  The lettuce is finished, with the next generation still tiny seedlings waiting to be planted out (which I won’t do until I can provide them with decent watering).  The plums are starting to ripen; they look reasonably plentiful.

Neat paths ...

... rearranged by the birds

The birds are making the best of it.  I'm keeping their water supply going, but they have to find their own food.  Earlier in the summer, I became fed up with weeding the veg plot paths and bought a load of shredded bark to top-dress some of the paths, on top of a layer of cardboard and some packaging paper that I had lying around.  It looked really good when I’d finished; but since then the birds have been rooting around in it in search of food, and exposing the paper, making it all look very untidy.  A male blackbird has been sunbathing down there, and he is the main suspect, I fear.  A female pheasant has also been sunbathing in the garden in the hot weather; she was pancaked in the grass beyond the plum tree the other day.

Sunbathing pheasant

Many plants seem to be flowering, or fruiting, early this year; the buddleja has had some flowers on it since the beginning of the month, whereas it often hasn’t done anything until late July.  In the past I’ve wondered if it had something to do with when I pruned it, but this year I finished pruning it very late and so that can’t be the reason.  Presumably it’s the weather.  It does mean, however, that there are plenty of butterflies.  In the past I haven’t attempted the Big Butterfly Count, from mid-July until very early August, because there haven’t been enough butterflies to count until later, but this year the sun has brought them out early; there have been single individuals of peacock, red admiral and comma, but plenty of whites, meadow browns, gatekeepers and common blues, and I’ve seen skippers and small coppers enjoying the oregano flowers.  There was also a lovely painted lady on the buddleja the other day.  I’m looking forward to doing a BB Count when it starts in a couple of days’ time.

Gatekeeper

Small copper

Painted lady on the buddleja

One of the blues

The result of backsliding

The combined effect of last month's two weeks of holiday, hot weather during which I avoided spending too much time outdoors and having other (non-gardening) things to do has not been good for the garden.  It’s now looking even more dishevelled than it did on our return from abroad.  There’s another spell of hot (for us) weather starting; today we had 29C (85F) and temperatures in the low thirties are forecast for later in the week, but I really need to get out there and do something about the weeds and other long-overlooked jobs.

The soaking station

With only one day of rain recently – a couple of heavy downpours in the middle of last week – watering has been high on the list of must-dos.  Fortunately the village's water supply problem has been solved, but I’m trying to conserve as much water as I can; grey water from the kitchen is being stored for the plant pots.  A ‘soaking station’ has been set up in the relative shade of the house for those pots in need of emergency care; only small pots will fit in the old washing-up bowl, but it means that the watering can is reserved for the bigger pots, the bird baths and those plants in the ground that need it most (like the courgettes). 

Some areas of the garden are so overrun with grasses and other weeds that they have to be left for intensive attention, preferably when the weather is a little cooler and I can spend longer in the open!

Overrun with grasses!

Today I spent as much time in the shade as I could, venturing out into the sun from time to time to deal with specific jobs.  The dill is flowering beautifully – it’s a very ornamental herb – and I cut a good amount of the leaves to chop and freeze, which I hope will see me through the year.  There were small twigs on the patio to be swept up and disposed of, the remains of a nest that a pair of woodpigeons started to build in the wisteria; woodpigeons make a terrible mess of their surroundings, so I had pulled the nesting material out, repeatedly (and untidily), but that didn’t seem to deter them.  Even putting some holly twigs in their preferred space (I reckoned that the female wouldn’t want to sit too long on holly leaves) didn’t work.  In the end I put some chicken netting around the nest area, and they transferred their attention to the top of the hedge instead.  While I was sweeping the patio, I remembered that the lilies in the big pot in the corner needed staking, and that was another shady job that I could do.

One benefit of having a lot of plant material that needs removing is that some of it can be composted, and it’s a good time of year to be filling up the hotbin and the other bins.  The leaf beet is running to seed, and, although the seed heads are destined for the council’s green waste bin, the stems and leaves are good for composting; the same is true of the foxgloves, most of which are fading.  I was also going to do this with last year’s parsley stems, which I allow to flower partly because the flowerheads are decorative and partly to save seed for next year, but when I examined them I saw that they were covered with soldier beetles, harmless red insects which are part of the garden’s biodiversity, so I’ve left them for a little longer.

Soldier beetles on the parsley flowers

The garden’s biodiversity never fails to surprise me: yesterday a (harmless) grass snake was spotted slithering through the grass below the apple tree.  I hope he was able to find some water; they prefer dampness rather than dry gardens.

36C

As predicted, we had a remarkable heatwave for several days last week, with a top temperature in our garden of 36.2C (about 98F) in the shade.  That may not sound much to some of my readers, but up here in an exposed position on the windy Wolds it is unprecedented in our experience.  Admittedly the thermometer was standing on concrete paving slabs and in the shade of the house – both factors that will have (slightly) raised the reading, official readings are of air rather than ground temperatures – but, still ….  A nice breeze helped keep things just about manageable, but there was very little gardening for a few days; we had windows and curtains closed and were mostly cowering indoors, venturing down to the summerhouse for meals and sitting out in the (relative) cool of evening.  Much cooler now, with temperatures set to rise to high twenties later in the week.

Blue windowbox

I managed to keep the plants on the right side of drying up as far as I can tell (sometimes the damage isn’t apparent until later).  This wasn’t helped by a very intermittent water supply (or low pressure) over the weekend, culminating in no water at all on most of Sunday; Thames Water eventually found a blockage in the system, after several days of blaming malfunctioning pumps, and fixed it, but it meant that filling up the watering can was a bit tricky to say the least.  The windowbox, which despite my fears has been looking fairly colourful (mostly from the blue echium), was wilting one day but perked up after as much of a soaking as I could give it.

On our return from our holiday I restarted the hotbin, which had gone a bit quiet because of not being fed for a couple of weeks; after a good input of grass clippings and other waste it warmed up considerably.  The temperature in there normally peaks at 40C (104F) and can be quite a lot less, but the outside weather does affect it and in the hot spell it was running at just over 60C (140F); it has since calmed down as the waste level dropped.  The compost removed from the bin was spread round the two courgette plants, which seem to have appreciated the attention and are now just starting to produce little fruits.

The other remarkable thing in the garden in the past week was the discovery of a large wasp nest on the outside of the porch.  We hadn’t noticed it until a painter came to assess the external woodwork prior to a repainting job later in the summer; understandably he was rather keen to see the nest gone before he starts work.  A wasp control man has now dealt with it and the wasps have dispersed.  It was quite a splendid building feat for small insects.

Wild abandon

A couple of weeks away, and in our absence the garden has run riot.  A mix of warmth and wet in the weather has resulted in everything going mad.  I had started to cut back the rampant rose ‘Mary Queen of Scots’ (which I’ve been threatening to eradicate for as long as I’ve been writing this blog) and thought I had made a pretty good start, but now it’s bigger than ever.  Need to start again ….  And there’s a thicket of goosegrass at the back of the fruit patch.

Rose 'Gertrude Jekyll', Cephalaria gigantea and Stipa tenuissima

Not that all the wild abandon is necessarily a bad thing.  The rose ‘Gertrude Jekyll’ has had more flowers than I can remember (a lot of dead-heading to do), and the big Cephalaria gigantea, planted last year, has flowered spectacularly; it’s a pale yellow that looks fine alongside the pinks and purples (self-seeded linaria) in that bed.  There are also cosmos planted out hurriedly before I went away, but not yet in flower.  The dahlias, all potted up, are starting to produce buds.

The '(not-so-)new' patio bed

Corn camomile, foxgloves and Sweet William behind

Foxgloves and snapdragons (antirrhinums)

Down in the veg patch the Sweet William is going great guns, as is the corn camomile that self-seeded from last year’s wildflower show, and the space given over to self-sown foxgloves and snapdragons is looking colourful.  The orchids under the plum tree are also out.  There don’t seem to have been any plant casualties while we were away; a neighbour has been watering the tomatoes, which look a little heat-stressed and have thrown out a lot of side-shoots, but are already showing some little green fruits.

Pyramidal orchids in the grass

Also in flower is the pak choi that I planted out before our holiday; I keep forgetting not to sow it until later in the summer so that it doesn’t run to seed.

On the subject of casualties, sadly Prickles the hedgehog (see last post) didn’t make it.  The hedgehog rescue people gave him excellent care, but the vet thought that he had been hit by a strimmer that injured his brain, and the damage to his nose affected his ability to breathe.  They were able to give him pain relief that would have eased his end.  We’re hoping that the second hedgehog that was around last year might still be with us – fingers crossed.

The weather has now turned very hot – records are about to be broken!

Casualty

 

A little emergency yesterday.  I stepped out into the garden to consider which jobs needed doing most urgently, and, before I could decide, Prickles our hedgehog emerged from the gooseberry bushes.  In the middle of the day, in heat – which is never a good sign where hedgehogs are concerned.  He/she was sneezing repeatedly, seemed to have a very red nose (injury? or just very irritated by something?) and was being bothered by flies.  He didn’t seem to notice me, but came up close and lay down in the shade right beside me; after a couple of minutes he moved off into deeper shade by the house wall, ending up tucked behind the recycling boxes, as though he wanted to hide in cover. 

There is a hedgehog rescue charity not far away, so I consulted their website; following their advice, I put newspaper in a cardboard box and put Prickles inside with the lid closed, where he seemed to doze off while I rang the charity.  Bring him in, they said, so I did, and he/she is now in their safe hands being looked after.  I’ve said that I would like him/her back, assuming he/she recovers, so I hope to see our little casualty again!

The weather has been very hot for the past few days, which wouldn’t have helped Prickles; we do have a couple of saucers of water round the garden for the wildlife, and following the RSPB’s advice I’m trying to change the water regularly.  Our pair of greenfinches, a species which is one of the main casualties of the avian disease doing the rounds, came to drink today, and other birds have been enjoying drinks and baths.  The great tits seem to have left their nest when the heat began, presumably as the little ones had fledged rather than sit it out in a hot nestbox; I haven’t seen them since, but a family of blue tits has been feeding in the trees.  And on a couple of evenings our local tawny owl was sitting on next door’s roof, before flying into the ash trees opposite to feed a very vocal youngster.

A 'red on black' ladybird

The warm weather has helped the ladybirds, which seem plentiful this year; they're doing a good job at keeping the blackfly down on the broad beans.  I had to rescue a few from being binned along with the forget-me-not plants, which have mostly gone over and are starting to set seed.  We’ve had a few white forget-me-nots this year, which I like to encourage, although the blue ones make useful underplanting for the spring tulip pots so I do allow them to seed for that purpose.

Scarlet tiger moth - sadly deceased

I said in my last post that it would be nice to see a scarlet tiger moth again, and so I have – unfortunately a dead one, another casualty.  Well, butterflies and moths often have only a short lifespan once they emerge from their chrysalis – which is a pity.