Dry September in Sherwood

 

Dry. 

No-dig vegetable beds on our dusty sand continue to yield - but are getting desperate. The farm field irrigator harasses me along the footpath on my morning walk. It is watering a field of unharvested potatoes where the haulm was killed by spraying at least two weeks ago. Prior to that they received a weekly fungicide spray.

In a rare short shower a robin in mid-moult bathes on the wet leaves of winter honeysuckle (lonicera purpussii). A whit-whitting nuthatch. On the pine stump a glorious male kestrel on its' regular beat. Fluting young buzzards. The deep grunt of ravens.

Our recycled water tanks still provide stored rainwater for afternoon or evening watering of Container Garden pots, polytunnel and recent transplants. I’m behind so my ‘Watering Wednesday’ is performed the following Sunday.

Senshui yellow multi-sown overwintering onions

In the biodynamic calendar we are still within ‘Northern transplanting time’ (descending moon) which we are told is a good time for planting and for applying compost to the soil. Multi-sown Senshui yellow onions and onion sets are now in the ground. The grumpy toad I re-homed from one of the compost bays disagreed that this was a good time for moving compost. I explained to her that on some days you're the pigeon and others the statue.

We are adopted by a vocal, tiny, baby grey squirrel. It stumbles about following us. It must have tumbled from its drey. These animals are pests capable of doing a lot of damage to a home with wood gables and cedar shingles on the roof. I gentle it into a bucket and release it in a corner of the Woodland Garden where cyclamen hederifolium splashes the floor in colours from white to magenta..

Frosted orange moth

Invertebrates are active - and hunting common and soprano pippistrelle and noctule bats click the detector at night.

Our moth light registers the turning seasons with ninety five moths of twenty one species including:

Dusky thorn

Black rustic

Frosted orange

Orange sallow  

  

The light was a magnet too for coupling crane flies. And parasitic ichneumon wasps which performed death dances around the moths. 

I mowed the lawn and now a mountain of mowings has joined the piles of invasive red stemmed parrot feather dredged from Georges Pond waiting to be composted.

Every dip of the net into the pond brought dragonfly and damselfly nymphs and smooth newts still in their aquatic larval stage.

Next doors lawn has been ploughed by badgers.

Cyclamen hederifolium