Feast or famine II

Apart from a showery spell a couple of weeks ago, the weather has continued dry (we’re now in Heatwave 4, although the past few days have been more cloudy and breezy than hot).  The garden is parched, and although little has died prematurely in the veg plot, nothing is actually growing very much.  I have some seedlings (radicchio, cima di rapa, a late cabbage or two) ready to go out, and will have to water assiduously to keep them alive.  There are warnings that vegetable supplies may be impacted, and that, because berries and other wild fruits are appearing early, wildlife may run short of food this autumn and winter.  Although I've been picking blackberries across the lane, I'm happily leaving a good number for the birds and other denizens of the hedgerow.

Pears ,,,

,,, and apples

It has been an excellent fruit year.  The plum crop (now long gone or laid down as preserves, see below) was large, the apples are prolific and we have a few of the best pears our two little trees have ever produced.  Even the fig, in its over-shady position, has done well.  Down at the bottom of the garden, the wild damson trees – probably suckers from the plum tree, which was probably grafted onto a damson rootstock – rarely produce enough fruit for us to bother with; the fruit is small and very sour, and really only fit for use in flavouring liqueurs, in the manner of sloe gin, and you need a fair quantity of them to do that.  This year, though, there’s a good number of them.  We recently unearthed a long-forgotten bottle of home-made damson gin in the cellar, 2011 vintage, which has turned out to be delicious with its 14 years of bottle age.  There’s a bottle of cheap gin in the house, bought so that we could preserve some of the plums, so the rest of it has gone to make more damson gin.  I doubt if we’ll manage to keep it for 14 years though!

Damsons - ready for the gin!

I had carefully netted my cabbages to prevent butterflies from laying their eggs on them.  In the end, it has been the dry weather that has finished off the cabbages rather than the butterflies, helped by the presence of a red ant nest in the soil of that bed.  When I passed by yesterday, there was a frantic fluttering under the netting – a wren had somehow got in there and was trapped.  How did it manage that?  I lifted the netting and let it out, and it flew off with a loud chirp.  The netting was put back in place.  Later on, I passed by again, and – there, under the netting, was the wren.  So I let it out again.  And later still – yes, the wren was back.  I gave up and left the netting half off the bed, but still lying on its supports; the remains of the cabbages are so unappealing that no butterfly is likely to lay eggs on them.  The wren spent several hours in its little tent, fluttering busily around and apparently picking something (flies?) off the underside of the net; this morning, at breakfast time, it was in there again, working hard at finding whatever is attracting it.  Perhaps it’s feeding itself up in anticipation of a hard winter?