Thursday, 21 June 2012

Fox in the garden

We have quite a lot of wildlife in our garden because it is surrounded on 3 sides by a field used for grazing young cattle. This spring we've been visited a few evenings by a fox, possibly a vixen, scavenging for scraps from the bird table. He/she seems to like the peanuts especially.
The photos are blurred because they were taken at about 9.00 pm and quite dark so I had to do a bit of image processing.

Fox in our Garden

She seemed to like the peanuts scattered for the birds

Sunday, 17 June 2012

Stormy weather

It's been a pretty horrible week - Mum ill with shingles and very wet and stormy weather making gardening a bit difficult. The weather people say we've had the wettest April and are set to have the wettest June since they started recording these things, and that after the driest winter and warmest February! 

However, everything in the garden is growing, including weeds of course, and it looks like a jungle.

On Friday we had a heavy thunderstorm with hail which has shredded the leaves of rhubarb, marrows and squashes and snapped off the top 18ins shoots of the broad beans. Joe Hashman (On the Plot with Dirty Nails) says he pinches out the tops of his broad beans to deter black fly (before they get infested) and steams them like spinach so I had a go and they were really nice. A bit more bitter than spinach but good with butter and pepper. Shame to waste them!

On a good note, we've harvested the 4 pots of potatoes planted in February and the first early Colleens in the veg plot are starting to flower so a good sign they'll be ready in a couple of weeks.

Friday, 1 June 2012

Cuckoo

A cuckoo is cuckooing loudly from one of our two walnut trees. He was calling at 6 this morning and flying around and cuckooing since. They are late this year. Usually we hear them from April onwards.  I seem to remember a poem from childhood about cuckoos "changing their tune" in June, signifying I think, that the breeding season was over and the parents were soon back off to Africa. Apparently their offspring go later. Of course they abandon their eggs in some other poor bird's nest so there's no parental care or teaching how to be a cuckoo. They just know instinctively how to get back to the warm of Africa when the time comes.