Winter is coming

On our return after autumn travels, it’s clear that the garden has moved into early winter mode, with the wildlife that comes with that.  The weather isn’t particularly cold for November, and although there has been some morning mist there has been relatively little low cloud; but the light has moved from the soft yellow light of autumn to the cold blue light of winter, and the birds that had dispersed for the autumn are back in their winter quarters.  The migrants, fieldfares and redwings, have arrived too.  Although no food would have been put out for them in our absence, the plentiful cooking apples and holly berries in the garden are a prime attraction.

Plenty of cooking apples ...

.... and holly berries

The collared doves and woodpigeons, including our lame friend Lefty, never really went far away, and are still hanging around in considerable numbers.  Likewise the sparrows, who enjoy the bathing facilities, and our two robins, who are again competing for territory.  The thin nervous robin’s bad foot appears to have healed, and he/she is defending the patio from the other robin and occasionally from the dunnocks.  There are several finches around, including a small flock of goldfinches, a pair of chaffinches and at least one greenfinch, as well as blue and great tits and three or four blackbirds.  The pair of mistle thrushes have been sitting in the big ash tree from time to time, along with a large number of starlings; they like to sit in the top of the tree in the afternoon to catch the last of any sun.  They will miss that tree when it’s taken down.

There have been a couple of surprises: a male blackcap, possibly on passage to somewhere a little warmer for the winter, and a grey wagtail.

The hedgehog has presumably gone into hibernation, but other four-legged visitors have been seen.  The squirrel is a regular, digging up the hazelnuts that it buried in the lawn (and occasionally in the veg plot’s woodchip paths) over the autumn.  D spotted a fine adult fox one day, something that we suspect visits the garden from time to time but is rarely seen.  And another day we had a weasel running around the patio; it had obviously found a mouse or vole nest and was taking its prey, one after another, somewhere else to eat.  Well, if you encourage wildlife into your garden you can’t be too picky about what will turn up; not all wildlife is cuddly.

Ashes to ashes, part II

A long pause since the last post, caused by circumstances mostly beyond my control.  The circumstances are going to limit active gardening for a few weeks yet, but there are plenty of plans to be made, and there will be more about them in future posts.  For the moment, then, a look backwards.

Here one day ....

Before we went away for a short break, our neighbours bowed to the inevitable and had their ash tree, the one that overhung the veg plot, cut down to a tall stump.  The idea is to encourage the clematis montana that is growing up it on their side to cover the remains of the trunk.  Despite the height of the tree, remarkably little wood landed on our side of the wall (even though most of the crown was actually on our side).  The neighbours have gained a lot more light - the tree shaded their whole garden - and I gained another load of woodchip for my paths.  In fact, the removal of their tree and ours has noticeably increased the amount of light in houses and gardens across the road which I didn't think would be affected; you don't realise how much light these trees can block out, and at what a distance.

... and gone the next

The third, and most diseased, of the ash trees round our garden, the big one in the field beyond the bottom border, is scheduled to be taken down before the end of the year.  It's sad, but these are trees that could cause a lot of damage if they fell.  Leaving some of the stumps in place at least provides some sort of habitat for wildlife such as insects, even in the dead wood.

Don't sit under the apple tree

It has been a decidedly mixed growing year, and the fruit crop has been no exception.  One unexpected success was our first fig (just one); a little on the dry side, but a reasonable size.  There are several little figlets for overwintering, so I have some hopes of a few more next year.  The raspberries did quite well (one of the canes has now started to flower, very unseasonably – what’s all that about?).  However there were no gooseberries or blackcurrants worth mentioning, and some neighbours have had the same experience.   The cold spring weather, resulting in fewer pollinators?

Given the lack of soft fruit, I wasn’t surprised that in early summer there seemed to be relatively few apples and plums developing on the trees, and when it came to thinning the crops I erred on the side of generosity, to make the most of what fruit there would be.  This proved to be unnecessary and, in the case of the cooking apple tree, a mistake.  The plum tree actually produced fairly well, and the apples, the cordon dessert apples as well as the cooking apple tree, turned out to have the heaviest crop we’ve ever had; and in the case of the cordons, some of the individual apples are larger than ever.

Some of the plum crop

Dessert apple cordons

More cordons

Of course, this came at a cost.  Because I didn’t thin the fruitlets particularly thoroughly (though goodness knows I took a lot of them off the tree!), the cooking apple tree’s branches are now overloaded, bending down low and, in some cases, breaking off.  They’re big apples, and can be heavy.  It’s difficult to get underneath the tree where it overhangs the veg beds, as it’s bent down to the ground; some of those branches are going to have to be removed during the winter pruning, just to allow us to get under there, and to get the tree back into shape.  A lesson learnt: next year, don’t allow too many apples to develop near the ends of the branches, to stop them being pulled down.

Don't even try to sit under the apple tree!

Those branches nearest the veg beds have been a bit of a problem for a while now.  When I designed the vegetable plot, I put in the main access point, a little path through the bed along the edge, just where those branches are.  It was a geometric thing: the plot is three times as long as it is deep, so the beds are laid out in three equal-sized groups, and the central group has a path running down the middle which is aligned with the entrance path.  As the tree grew, it became increasingly difficult to get in and out without banging my head on the branches.  Over the summer, the obvious solution dawned on me: don’t do anything to the tree, instead move the entrance!  I’m in the process of creating two entrances, one each side of the tree, aligned with the paths separating the three bed groups.  You can see one of the paths, still under construction, at the bottom left of this picture of part of the plot.

Also visible in the pictures, and also still under construction, are some of the new woodchip paths that I’m creating in there, using woodchip from the felled ash tree.  The paths were originally gravel, but over the years this has disappeared into the soil.  There were also plank edges to the beds – some of the planks are still lying about, partially in use but no longer retaining any soil.  They were a mixed success, falling over a lot, easily kicked over and needing to be put back up again, and in the end I more or less gave up on them.  The final straw came last autumn when our local tree man removed the large overhanging branches from next-door’s ash tree; if a guy is prepared to climb 10 metres/30 feet up a tree and lower the sawn-off branches down, you can’t really ask him if he would mind not disturbing the bed edges while he does it (and could he possibly not disturb the parsley growing underneath? In fact the parsley survived very well).  Reasonably enough, the beds looked rather dishevelled afterwards.

Rather dishevelled (after last autumn's tree work)

Charles Dowding, whose no-dig methods I’m trying to follow to some extent, reckons that wooden edges are unnecessary and act as a haven for slugs and snails; he demarcates the paths and beds by using woodchip for the former and mulch for the latter.  You need an awful lot of mulch (compost, manure, leaf mould etc), but it does seem to work.  Some of the paths still need weeding before I can get the woodchip down – in particular there are a number of productive alpine strawberry plants (visible in one of the photos above) which will be pulled up once they’ve stopped fruiting – but already things are looking a lot better, and the woodchip should keep the weeds down.  It also allows me to widen the paths, which have been too narrow to be practical.  And I can now walk past the apple tree instead of ducking down under it!

Starting to look better!

Last of the summer wine

Weatherwise, it hasn’t been a great summer here, on the whole, and the signs are that it’s downhill from here.  After a very warm ten days or so in July, we had a mostly disappointing August – remarkably dull, grey and with a chilly wind from the north, for much of the month.  September has been better, with a couple of warm days but mostly just nice autumnal weather: plenty of misty mornings, pleasant days and cooler evenings once the sun has set.  Although the summer has been dry overall, it hasn’t been exactly the sort of weather that we might have hoped for, and now change is on the way, with wet and windy autumnal conditions for the next few weeks.

Lefty's morning bath

The depressing August weather was all the more depressing for coinciding with the end of the birds’ breeding season, when the juveniles start dispersing and the adults take themselves into hiding while they moult.  For a few weeks the entertainment of their comings and goings declines quite noticeably, as does their interest in the bird feeders, though they do enjoy the birdbaths; moulting must be a slightly uncomfortable business, and a nice bath seems to help.  The birds are still around, but often relatively inconspicuous (and mostly silent) in the tree canopies or out in the hedgerows, where there’s plenty of food for them, though a family of long-tailed tits did turn up on the fatball feeder one day.  They’re always a cheerful sight, clustering together with their tails sticking out in all directions, until they decide they need to be somewhere else.  A couple of warblers (chiffchaffs?) have been catching insects from the treetops, and a pair of tawny owls calling mournfully in the evenings.  The robins are marking out their winter territories with melancholy-sounding songs; sadly the thin robin who mostly hangs around the patio seems to have damaged its right foot, with the claws all clenched together as a sort of peg-leg, though it appears to be managing well enough.  Perhaps I ought to call it Righty the Robin, on the same lines as Lefty the lame pigeon.

Long-tailed tits on the fatballs

Lefty, with his lady, seems to have raised at least two youngsters; we watched them pester him (unsuccessfully) for food one day.  He wasn’t having any of it, even when one of them jumped on him like an overenthusiastic toddler, and they went off to find their own supper.  The pigeons at the bottom end of the garden, meanwhile, who are quite tolerant of our comings and goings, spent much of the late summer trying to nest in the plum tree.  It wasn’t much of a nest, just a few sticks high in the canopy, and the cold August winds destroyed it at least once, but finally they seem to have succeeded: a youngster has been calling to be fed from the nest over the past few days.

The August winds also gave a further battering to the poor old buddleja, which nevertheless managed to flower well enough to attract a good number of butterflies.  Red Admirals and small tortoiseshells were well represented, and there was a painted lady, but few peacocks this year; however I did finally manage a definite identification of a small skipper, which I thought I had seen several times in the past but which were flitting about too fast for me to see them properly (which is why they’re called skippers).  This one sat on the buddleja for long enough for me to get my phone and take a photo. We ought to have a healthy population of large whites in future, too; the netting over the brassicas failed to keep them off the broccoli, and their caterpillars have eaten the plants bare.

Small skipper on the buddleja

Red admiral

Painted lady

Large white butterfly caterpillars - no broccoli this year!

If the butterflies provide garden interest by day, and the owls by night, it's the hedgehog that we look for in the evenings; we've seen him or her a few times when we've been returning from supper in the summerhouse after dark.  Slugs do not seem to have been a problem this year, and this may be the reason why!

Ashes to ashes

The three big ash trees round our boundary are all suffering from ash dieback.  While the one next to our driveway was the least affected, it was the only one that was actually ours, the others belonging to owners of neighbouring land.  If it fell, as it probably would have done at some point, it would have landed either on our house, our garage, the neighbours' house and garage, or the overhead electricity wires that run past our property.  None of those options would have been good.  

Last day of the tree

So we finally managed to engage Michael the local tree-man to cut it down; a sad decision, but a necessary one.  It involved a very large cherry-picker to deal with the higher branches (that's the red thing in the 'before' photo).  Suddenly the view from the kitchen window is a lot lighter, and currently dominated by a very large pile of firewood; that should see us through a winter or three.  And the smaller branches produced a load of woodchip, which I'm using to renew the paths in the veg plot.

Afterwards

The stump is still there - realistically it was just going to be too difficult to grind it out - and from a quick count of the rings I reckon the tree was about 150 years old.  You can see the dark patches where the dieback had taken hold, and some of the firewood has nasty-looking bits in where the wood was affected.  The stump will become some sort of feature until it rots away; once the area has been cleared of sawdust (I can find a use for that too), I'll need to clear it of weeds and give some thought to how to plant if up.  It will now be considerably sunnier than in the past, though the tree roots mean that only the tiniest seedlings, or seed, can go in there, which limits the options.

As for the other trees, we're making noises to the owners about removal; neither of them would hit the house (just) if/when they fall, but they would make a big mess of most of the garden.  Sorry, trees - and the wildlife that enjoys them - but the alternatives aren't good either.

The volunteers

As usual, I’ve sown more seeds than I can realistically handle.  Some are still in trays, waiting to be put into their patio pots; at least I’ve managed to keep most of them watered, although I’ve had to scrap some that got too leggy or sad-looking.  Next year I really must cut back.  Especially as some plants are showing me that they can take care of all the germinating and growing on by themselves.

Panicum seedling, flowerhead just opening

I have some panicum (grass with big feathery flowerheads) and antirrhinum seedlings still not planted out; but last year’s plants of both varieties have self-seeded, and are making better growth than my seedlings, so I needn’t have bothered.  The panicum was an F1 hybrid so its seedlings won’t have come true, but they look perfectly satisfactory to me.  Last year’s sweet William plants have also seeded, and I’ve planted some of those out at the far end of the veg plot for next year; this is useful as the rather old seed that I sowed in June didn’t germinate.

Violas under the sweet peas

The sweet pea pots were re-used from last year, with the new plants put in last year’s compost and a bit of fertiliser added to give them some feed; last year there were some violas in there, to provide some colour at the feet of the sweet peas, and their offspring are doing very well this year.  Violas and pansies are great self-seeders, and there are several coming up around the garden; like the panicums, they’re the products of F1 hybrids but still often fine plants.

Another, very pretty, self-seeded viola

Last year I let my parsley plants, under the ash tree at the side of the drive, seed themselves around.  Perversely they seem to have done most of their seeding into the gravel of the drive itself.  I’ve left them there (will pull them up before they seed in their turn), especially as I haven’t got round to sowing any this year (need to do that …) and these are the only usable parsley plants I currently have.

There are also some plants that seem to have germinated from seed that never came up last year but obviously survived the winter and germinated this year; I have a couple of dill plants that have appeared in places where I sowed seed last year.  Probably also in this category is a solitary bupleurum plant.  A couple of years ago I planted out a few bupleurums – they’re good flower-arranging filler plants – but didn’t take good care of them and they died; I can’t actually remember where I planted them, but this year a single bupleurum appeared in a row of lettuces.  Apparently they need cold weather for seed to germinate, so this seed might have been hanging around in the garden for a couple of years and only been started off by this year’s particularly cold spring.  I’m keeping the plant going in the hope of saving seed from it; and next time I will try to take better care of the resulting plants!

Bupleurum rotundifolium (with lettuce)

Winging it

During this last week or so we have been having summer – temperatures up to 30C (86F), even in our rather chilly garden, almost unbroken sunshine and the watering can in constant use.  It prompted the ants nesting in the greenhouse to take to the air one hot afternoon, to the delight of the birds: sparrows and blackbirds busily picking them up, and house martins and swifts swooping overhead for the higher-flying ones.  A couple of enterprising sparrows positioned themselves on the garage guttering directly above the greenhouse roof vents to catch those that flew out that way.  With the patio having been relaid, there are no longer any nests there for the birds to enjoy, but I’ve been putting out any others that I come across (there was a nest in one of the dahlia pots) to be dealt with by our avian visitors.

There have been a great many insects in the garden this year.  Our bees, sadly, buzzed off, we don’t know why; they had seemed happy enough and we left a lot of the lawn uncut so that they could feed on the clover, but our beekeeper neighbour confirmed that they had deserted their nestbox.  We’ve told him that we’d be happy to host another hive next year if he has one in need of a home.  However there have been plenty of bumble- and other bees, hoverflies and the like, and we’d like to think that leaving so much grass to grow long has helped.  (It’s now time to cut most of it down; there are ants’ nests appearing in the cowslip patch, and the blackbirds will be most appreciative if we expose them and let the lawn recover.)  I’ve also left the parsley to grow tall, partly for the flowers which look good in arrangements of cut flowers, partly for the seeds and partly to keep the pollinators happy; at a distance they just look like a froth of yellowy-green flowers but, closer to, you see that all sorts of insect life is in there.

Parsley in flower

Insect life on the parsley

... and a ladybird

The ladybird is particularly welcome.  I had the usual infestation of blackfly on my broad beans and on the leaf beet that is still in the veg patch from last year, flowering but still with a few edible leaves; however the ladybirds obligingly laid their eggs on those plants and the larvae cleaned up the beans completely and did a reasonable job on the spinach.  I see that there is also a larva on one of my aubergine plants in the greenhouse, dealing most effectively with the greenfly.

Hungry ladybird larva on the aubergines

Until a couple of weeks ago this had been a very poor year for butterflies, but the heat has brought more of them out, especially the whites, meadow browns and gatekeepers; there has been an occasional peacock, red admiral and tortoiseshell, but very few.  I'm hoping that more will turn up when the buddleja flowers, but a couple of weeks ago we had a very windy day which snapped a lot of the buddleja stems, so it's looking rather sorry for itself.  One day I spotted a very small blue butterfly but am struggling to identify it; the size suggested a Small Blue but it’s the wrong month, and the other contenders (Chalkhill Blue, Silver-studded Blue, Brown Argus, etc) seem to be too large or too early/late.  It was very pretty.  There is no shortage of cabbage whites, especially under the netting that I’ve put over the brassicas! – there are a couple of very fine cabbages in there and I’d like to keep them caterpillar-free.  The netting is also to deter the pigeons, though if I took it off the bluetits might deal with the caterpillars, so it’s a tricky trade-off. 

There are plenty of little bluetits and wrens around, and still a few baby sparrows being fed.  One day I left the back door open while I went outside to sow some seeds and, when I came back in, there was a baby wren in the dining room trying to get out of the (locked) patio doors.  It tried to hide behind the curtains, but I managed to scoop it up in a bundle of garden fleece and took it outside; I was a little bemused when it didn’t fly out of the fleece, but I found it clinging desperately to the hem of my T-shirt, most reluctant to let go.  Eventually it took off in search of mum; I hope it recovered quickly!