Lockdown Day 76 -Allotment Update-Part 2

Oops - I completely forgot to post the blog yesterday so today I'll have to have detention and do two!

The wet weather has revived the blueberries and they are looking a whole lot happier. They need rainwater rather than tap water and they sit in planters full of ericaceous compost as our soil is not acid enough. The net was left off while they were being pollinated but they are now fully protected against some rather hungry blackbirds!

Here are some grapes forming on the grape vine we have, again in its own pot. I'll thin these out quite substantially over the next couple of months and these will also have to be netted as when they get ripe they often disappear quickly if unprotected!

The wet weather has also brought the potatoes on and they are now fully recovered from the late frost we had in May. There's Red Duke of York and Cara potatoes in here. I may earth up the later ones (the rows furthest from the camera) a bit more to encourage more underground growth and I also pull the flowers off when they form. 

In a few days time we'll be picking blackcurrants with many now ripening on the bushes. A bit more rain and sun this week and they will be nice and juicy. Some go into jam and some get stored in sugar solution, and one year I popped some in vodka!

A couple of the calabrese are starting to form heads but it will be another two or three weeks at least before the biggest one currently is ready for harvest. 

Lockdown Day 75 - Allotment Update-Part 1

Today started off quite wet outside though the rain is much needed. The allotment is looking a lot, well, happier, now that the crops have had a good drink, especially the fruit bushes.

We seem to have dodged the showers today, but a look on the weather radar showed that they seemed to cruise past to the east and west of us, but not where we are! I am a bit of a wild weather enthusiast, though I must admit I feel the cold a lot more nowadays than I used to! It was very windy today though, unusually so for this time of year.

We were able to have some of these young broad beans for tea, with a salad that also had home grown cut-and-come-again salad leaves from a window box in the top bedroom, some spinach beet and radishes also from the allotment. The broad beans are in my opinion much nicer young than when they have grown large and grey coloured. Plus the plants will be encouraged to produce more beans. Still haven't had any need yet to nip the tips out though will be keeping an eye out for blackfly. We have some wild poppies in the same patch which the blackflies do appear to like going for when they are flowering, the principle of companion planting, diverting the attention of the pests away from your crops.

We have got peas forming now on the earliest plants to go in, not ready yet but in a week or two the first ones will be able to be picked. We've put in around thirty plants, though some that we sowed directly into the soil never came up and that space has now been weeded for putting more bean plants in, the latter are currently germinating in the house.

In the house as well are several pepper plants. I save the seeds from shop bought ones, so we have a mixture of long ones, jalapeno and bell peppers either in the house or in the lean-to greenhouse outside. They sometimes have a bit of an odd shape but it is a cheap way of getting plenty of seeds!

Lockdown Day 74 - Remembering Wildflowers near Bamburgh Castle

In a previous blog here I mentioned briefly about orchids around the sand dunes near Bamburgh Castle, Northumberland. Digging through my photos I have found some shots of these, it was amazing how many there were when we visited in July 2013.

We saw Pyramidal and Common Spotted Orchids as well as, I think, Northern Marsh Orchids among many other wild flower species in the dunes as you will see from the photos below it was a truly amazing habitat and the local bees and six-spot burnet moths loved it!

Lockdown Day 73 - Strawberries

Just a quick one this evening, to say that we are getting plenty of strawberries at the moment. Some of the plants we bought last year are quite early fruiting ones although I think that the recent sunny and hot weather has brought them on even further.

We've had four or five of these punnets so far off the plants with plenty more still to come, and some more in window boxes on the wall of our yard. We pot up a few runners in winter as well to keep fresh stock going.

The weather forecast doesn't look that great for the next few days, although we do need the rain. The night before last I spotted a hedgehog down our road so we have left some food and water under a plastic table in our yard just in case it comes back. There are fields off the end of our road so it will have plenty of space to roam around and with the rain, there will be plenty of food about for it.

Lockdown Day 72 - Bishop Wood - the inside story - Part 2

Yesterday, I did a blog post about some of the flowers we encountered on our walk around Bishop Wood. Today I present views of the woodland and of a couple of insects we saw on our walk.

Before I begin I must mention the very brief sighting of some kind of vole in a ditch in the wood, it wasn't a water vole as it was too small but could well have been a bank vole. Such a shame we didn't get a good view of it for further study.

I am not sure what has happened to this tree early on in its life, but I have never seen a tree attempt to tie a knot in itself before! If anyone can offer a plausible explanation for this weird shape please let me know!

This is a Speckled Wood (Pararge aegeria) butterfly, a very common species in woodland, and we've even had one or two around the allotment before now. Taking photographs of butterflies can sometimes be frustrating as their often flit off just as I have got focused and set up! This one was very obliging and I was fascinated by the stripy eye markings which can be seen better if you zoom in on the picture. 

Without being any form of expert, I find the diversity of insects, including beetles amazing, and especially as the finer details of these species are only apparent on close inspection. This is what I believe to be a beetle of the family Silphidae  (possibly Silpha atrata) often known as "burying beetles" as some of them bury small carcasses for food for themselves and their larvae (even such as birds, mice etc for the larger ones). If this is Silpha atrata then it feeds on snails. 

The forest is a mixture of ancient forest growth and some plantation/managed grown, for instance these pine trees are too orderly to have arrived there by accident. It is, if you go at the right time of day and keep to the smaller paths, a very peaceful place,with plenty of birdsong and plenty to look at, and a month or two ago will have been carpeted in many places with bluebells as the plants are going to seed now. It will be nice to have another trip here later in the year.

Lockdown Day 71 - Bishop Wood - The inside story - Part 1

At the weekend we cycled on the main road through Bishop Wood as I mentioned here and I said that we would choose a quiet time this week to go for a walk though the forest. Today we drove there (this is the first time since before lockdown I have driven anywhere other than to sort out shopping for us and my parents, I have only used half a tank of diesel since mid March!) and went for a walk in the forest.

The first interesting plants we can across were Yellow Flag Iris (Iris pseudacorus) in some marshy areas of the wood. 

This plant is thought by some to be the inspiration for the fleur-de-lis symbol on heraldry and coins. They can grow up to 150cm although these ones were around one metre tall. 

A few minutes of walking brought us to some orchids. These were Common Spotted Orchids (Dactylorhiza fuchsii) , not quite fully grown I think. Many orchids prefer marsh and heathland and I've seen these orchids in grassland with burnet moths feeding on them. 

Orchids are quite rare although when they do appear there are often quite a lot of them in one place. The sand dunes around Bamburgh Castle are a good place to see lots of Pyramidal Orchids for instance. 

Finally for this post is a Foxglove (Digitalis purpurea) just coming into flower. This plant is poisonous if consumed directly (so please don't!) but they contain digitalis which when correctly extracted and formulated can be used for treatment of heart failure and high blood pressure. 

In my next post I will present some views of the woodland and of a couple of insects we saw whilst walking around. 

Lockdown Day 70 - Peppers and reflection

I am sure these peppers have grown overnight! In the house we have several pepper plants grown from seeds saved from either our own or shop bought peppers - jalapeño and bell peppers. They usually still produce peppers well into the winter, and occasionally revive for a bit in the Spring. They will get a bit of tomato feed and a top up of compost at some point, but otherwise just regular watering. 

As I write this, today has seen more loosening of the lockdown here in the UK. Some schoolchildren have been going back to lessons with social distancing in place, although take up has only been around 50%. Markets can now open and small groups of people can gather in own gardens as long as two metres apart, among other things. There has, unfortunately, been a disregard of late for the rules in place, I have seen many people standing too close together, people visiting other houses, and reports on the internet of crowded beaches and tourist areas are concerning. There seems to be, as I write this, a levelling off of the downward trend in virus cases, and there are credible warnings from many health professionals, based on strategy and planning within hospitals, of a second peak of the virus in July and August.

Personally, we are sticking to previous arrangements at the moment, one of us working from home, one furloughed, one day a week for shopping, only going out for exercise into the countryside, either walking or out on a bike ride where we know we can be distant from others, and keeping older relatives safe. The most difficult situation for us is not being able to visit one of our daughters in Northampton on her birthday coming up, she has no garden and the lack of public toilets at the moment means we couldn't visit her in a park (and with no pubs open etc) as there's no way we'd manage for a 260 mile round trip!

I have no trust in the Government. Their failure to lock down early enough may well have resulted in 30000 preventable deaths, their misuse of statistics, the arrogance of Dominic Cummings, the spineless and sheep like support for him from many of the governing party, seemingly content to accept a string of lies, and the far too rapid loosening of restrictions. This means that we are looking out for ourselves and being careful, even when others don't seem to care anymore.

We are luckier than many people living where we do with countryside a couple of minutes walk away - we can often see cows or sheep grazing in a nearby field.  I am not sure how I would have managed in a flat in the inner city or indeed in identikit suburbia, miles from countryside. Or in fact how I would have managed with a lockdown like in some other countries with even tighter restrictions - in Ireland people were not able to go and tend allotments for a few weeks and many countries had strict limits on distance you could walk - but maybe the latter should have have been the case here, countries such as France and Italy are returning to normal, with fewer deaths, than here in the UK.

Even so, there's been days when I have felt down, felt like there is no end to this lockdown and indeed so much sadness for the countless families bereaved and the awful way that many people have ended their lives. There much be so much trauma for those caring for coronavirus patients in hospital and care homes, the doctors, nurses, care workers and other staff seeing death daily, repeatedly. (In a previous job - as a support worker - myself and a colleague discovered a client that had passed away in his sleep so I have a small insight)

With this blog each day I have tried to share the happiness I find in nature, in growing food, in the countryside, it is easy to get sucked into the rolling news and the scrolling social media, and what we all need I think is time out in the peace and quiet. Unfortunately, as more and more people go back to work and out for leisure time, that peace is slowly diminishing, the background hum of the traffic is coming back, people are leaving their trash in our natural world, disturbing wildlife and trespassing on farmer's property.

I'll be continuing this blog until my own lockdown ends, that is when I go back to work in a charity shop. I hope you have enjoyed the many posts I have put up, enjoyed sharing some nature experiences with me over these past couple of months and our progress in the allotment.

Stay safe
Michelle