Spring Days

Tags

cherry-plum, daffodil, Emmaus, garden improvements, greylag, heron, ladybird, Mallard, new furniture, primrose, rook, rook's nest, spring flowers, sweet violet, wild birds

There isn’t much of interest to report – we have been busy and we are all very tired but there isn’t much to show for it all.

We have had a new suite of furniture delivered for our living room and the old sofas and reclining chair have been donated to Emmaus a charity that helps and supports the homeless.  They have a second-hand retail shop at Ditchingham, a village a few miles to the north of us which is where our furniture was taken.  The new furniture is very different but extremely comfortable.  It is also less bulky than our old furniture so our living room seems a little bigger.

Our old shed has been demolished and we have had a concrete pad laid next to the tool shed where we will put a new potting shed.  Getting rid of the old shed, which really was an eyesore, has opened up the garden at the north side of the house.  Richard has dug over the soil which was underneath the shed and will add organic matter to it to help rejuvenate it.  Eventually, he would like to plant flowering shrubs there.  He has also added compost to and dug over the soil in the vegetable beds.  The potatoes are ready for planting and Richard will begin sowing pea and bean seeds in pots soon.  The weather has been much too cold recently for anything to be planted outside and as we have an unheated greenhouse we daren’t sow seeds there just yet either.

Last week we saw quite a lot of sunshine and even though the wind was from the north-east and very cold everything seemed very spring-like.  This week there has been increasing amounts of cloud and a lot of drizzly rain so with the cold wind it feels like a return of winter.  The daytime temperature has stayed between 5 and 6 degrees C all the week.

I walked round the garden last week and took a few photographs in the sunshine.

A Mallard swimming on the big pond

Mallard drake

Primroses in one of the ditches round the garden

Daffodils flowering on the bank of the big pond

A Rook’s nest being built in the Ash tree.

Greylag pair on the pond

Greylags on the pond

Greylags on the pond

I have seen the heron in the garden a few times.

I tried to sneak up on the heron as it stood at the side of the pond but it saw me and flew into the field behind our house. This is a poor photo that has been severely cropped.

I found a half-eaten fish on the path round the pond which could have been left there by the heron or by the otter which is causing owners of ponds in our area to wish the otter was living many miles away!

Ladybird

Ladybird

Ladybird

Mallards in the front ditch

Mallards in the front ditch

Mallards in the front ditch

Mallards in the front ditch

Sweet violet

Cherry-plum

 

Cherry-plum

Cherry-plum

My choice of music for this post is Emmanuel Chabrier’s ‘Suite Pastorale’.  As soon as I hear it I think of spring days in the countryside – cool breezes, sparkling streams, flowers and singing birds.  I hope you like the music as much as I do.

Thanks for visiting!

 

Gardening and Feeding Birds

Tags

Mark Cocker 'Crow Country', Norwich Cathedral, Rain, rooks, weeding, wild birds

A beautiful red sunrise this morning and some frost on the grass.  We had a lot of heavy rain yesterday evening with high winds and thunder and lightening but during the night the sky cleared and the wind dropped.  Yesterday afternoon I managed to work in the garden for a few hours.  There has been so little cold weather that the weeds are growing very well and so I decided to try to clear the worst affected flower bed.  It was hard going as the soil in our garden is clay over chalk and flint and with all the rain we have had the soil had become very sticky mud.  It is not recommended that work is done with the ground so wet but if I had left the weeds, mainly red dead-nettle and thistles, they would have totally engulfed all the miniature bulbs coming up.  I wasn’t able to finish the whole bed before it got dark and began to rain but most was done and I was quite pleased.

This morning we decided to go to Norwich Cathedral and have lunch in the city.  The drive was pleasant (especially as R drove not me!) and I noticed all the catkins on the trees and in the hedges.  The sky was very overcast as more rain was forecast but the roads were fairly empty and we quickly found somewhere to park.  E loves coming with us to the cathedral:  she enjoys listening to the choir and the wonderful organ playing and also being part of a large congregation.  We left the cathedral in pouring rain.  Only then did R realise he’d left his hat in the car and didn’t have his umbrella.  E had her umbrella but the wind kept blowing it inside-out.  We went straight to the café where we had some lunch and then did a little shopping.  I left E in Waterstones where she chose some books to buy with some of her birthday money, and went to buy her a new umbrella, some re-proofing spray and a couple of things from the chemist.  R went to buy himself some underclothes and a hat!

We got home at about 2pm and had a hot drink.  The rain eased off soon afterwards so I went out to feed the birds.  The amount of black sunflower seeds I use is amazing.  I have two sunflower feeders the larger of which is about 20″ tall and both need refilling every day.  I know that a lot of the seeds are taken by rooks and I haven’t yet found a way to deter them.  I admire them as they are very intelligent birds but when they descend on the garden in large numbers they eat most of the contents of a feeder in a very short space of time and that becomes expensive.  I have a squirrel deterrent on the larger feeder which is weight sensitive.  When it detects something heavy on the feeder an alarm sounds and then the feeder spins round quickly for a few seconds.  This has put the squirrels off but not the rooks!  I think they enjoy the challenge and seem to play on it.  One rook hangs on the feeder as it spins round and shovels out the seeds to friends waiting on the ground below.  Most infuriating!  A couple of years ago I was becoming almost bitter about this so I read the book by Mark Cocker called ‘Crow Country’.  He used to live not far from here and studied the local corvids as well as those in other parts of the country.  His book taught me to understand them and even to like them!  I now have to limit the amount of food I put out (to save my pocket) and if I think the rooks have been on the feeder too long I go out and shoo them away.  (They then wait for me to go out then gorge themselves until I return!).  Other unwelcome guests are next-door’s free-range chickens free-ranging in our garden and of course, the moles, the rats, the deer, the rabbits, the pheasants which peck off and discard! all buds, growing tips etc. of all the plants in the garden, other people’s cats and dogs and so on.
  It is now time to cook the evening meal.