countryside · summer · wildlife

August & September: dry & hot, then not

Julie (little Cotton Rabbits)11 Comments

Hello, and sorry to have been absent for a while, I hope all has been good with you over the last couple of months.

Things here have been a little overwhelming due to the building work we’ve been having done, more so than I imagined truth be told. The builders have been really wonderful in taking into consideration Toby’s needs and sensory issues, but even so it has been extra challenging at times. The work is now coming to a conclusion, though we still have bare floorboards and bare plastered walls, but we do now have a little downstairs bathroom and extended hallway storage, both of which are going to be invaluable in a small house with 4 adult occupants, and the new house frontage looks so lovely, replacing a very outdated and tired looking 1980’s plastic porch. Anyway, my brain is still reeling a little from all the upheaval and the meticulous planning aimed at minimising the impact on Toby, and so it’s taken me quite a while to write this post and I’ve struggled stringing the words together.

It is lovely to at last have some cooler and damper weather after this very dry and hot summer. The woods are beginning to look a little refreshed and there is new greenery coming up in the meadows, though a fair bit more rain is needed to compensate for the summer drought. The fragrance of the woods has changed too, from a summer potpourri smelling a little like a mix of hay, dried herbs and raisins, to the earthy damp and slightly mushroomy smell that follows rain and signals the coming of autumn. And in the last week the first few fungi have started to appear, including this impressively large chicken of the woods (I think), which is around 2ft tall. I’m so looking forward to the unfolding of Autumn and all it’s delights, I know I say this every year but it is one of my favourite seasons.

August and September have had some delightful moments though, in particular the partial eclipse (around 90% coverage here) on August 12th, which we watched in shadow form, diffused through the leaves of the plum tree and projected beautifully in multiples on to our little shed. In the pictures above you can see the progression of the moon shadow across the face of the sun from right to left, the first picture taken at 18:56 and the last at 19:17.

Another highlight has been watching hummingbird hawk moths come in to the garden and laying their eggs on a patch of sweet woodruff, and there’s a little video above of one carefully laying her eggs, one on each leaf. The eggs were tiny lime green spheres and from these emerged tiny pale yellow caterpillars (there is one in the very centre of the leaves on the picture above with the egg). Over the last 3 weeks they have grown enormously and are now around 5 cms long and as thick as a pencil. There are between 20-30 of them and during this last week they’ve been starting to run out of food, so voracious is their appetite for leaves. Happily we have a second larger patch of this plant in the garden and I’ve been carefully carrying some of them over to this so that they will not starve. I expect them to each begin spinning a cocoon in the next week and then beginning to change into their adult moth form – natures magic at work. It’s been a small joy to watch them grow to this point and I really hope to see at least some of them emerge as adults in a month or so. We don’t often see hummingbird hawk moths here, it’s probably been 8 or 9 years since I last saw any in the garden, but apparently this year has been a great year for them and there have been lots of sightings.

There’s no knitting news this time I’m afraid, with only a little simple sock knitting going on here, but now the building work is coming to an end I hope to begin working in earnest on the new animal design that I put aside back in July. I so look forward to sharing that with you once it is ready.

Thanks as always for continuing to visit here with me, even though I’ve been a bit quiet of late. I hope to be around a little more as the Autumn arrives and there’s a little more calmness in my days, ’til then keep well and happy, J x

countryside · foxes in my garden · summer · wildlife

July: from green to brown

Julie (little Cotton Rabbits)16 Comments

Wowee, it has been such a hot and very dry summer here. There has been no proper rain for months now and we’ve just had a drought declared, despite having had a very wet winter. The countryside is currently looking completely parched and out in the woods the trees are showing signs of stress with a lot of leaf drop and branches dying back, it’s a desperately sad sight and I keep hoping for cloudy days with rain, but they just don’t arrive here in the south east corner of England. The woods are so very quiet too, completely devoid of the birdsong that chimed through the trees during springtime, perhaps it just takes too much energy to sing in this heat when you are a very small bird fighting to survive.

The birds are still there though and July is a great time to find feathers out in the woods as many birds moult after breeding. I regularly find 2 or 3 owl feathers on each of our woodland walks because by day the meandering pathways through the trees may be human-trodden byways, but when night falls they are owl-swooped flyways. To me these fallen feathers are marvels of nature, with beautifully intricate structures of interlocking fine filaments and each individual feather has it’s own unique markings. I treat them as woodland treasure and bring them home to admire them. The collection above were all found during July this year.

Out in the countryside there have been a lot of insects and butterflies this year, and judging by their prevalence the dry conditions must favour them. And back at home in the garden I’ve seen several hummingbird hawk moths, they’re so wonderful to watch but utterly impossible to photograph as they are never still but constantly darting around on the move. There have also been Jersey Tiger moths this year, these are so striking with their black and cream upper wings and in flight they flit with bright orange flashes from their underwings. Apparently they are quite rare and their range is restricted usually to the very south of England, many years go by without us seeing them here but this year we’ve had several in the garden.

Lacking from the garden for a while however has been lovely Katsue. After not seeing her for quite a few days we discovered that our new neighbours had blocked up the wildlife corridor between our gardens. This gap in the fence has been there for over 30 years and during this time it has allowed the passage of many hedgehogs, foxes, frogs and toads. I am so upset by this but the new neighbours have an elderly cat that they don’t want to wonder too far, and at the end of the day it is their right to not have a hole into their garden if they do not wish it. Sadly they have also decimated and destroyed the beautiful wildlife-friendly garden that existed next door to us for over 40 years, with all of the mature trees and shrubs cut down in favour of lawn. This garden was so carefully planned and loving tended by our original neighbours, who both grew old and sadly passed away. I so wish that more people valued and treasured the wildlife that we share our gardens with, sadly not many of the people who have recently moved in around here do.

Anyway, we have managed to solve the lack of access for Katsue by opening our front gate at dusk, and after a week of me patiently coaxing her she now independently comes through that way and then round to the back door to trip the security light so I know she’s there. I then carry her food out to the front garden, as I don’t want her stuck in our back garden when I shut the front gate at bedtime. So at least I still see her each evening, though she no longer has access to come and go as she pleases, and with her not being able to come during the day it’s harder to take pictures of her, though she has started coming into the kitchen while I chop her food. I am still sad though as it means there will be no access to our garden for other foxes in future, or for the hedgehogs, frogs and toads that we’ve enjoyed seeing so much over the years we’ve lived here.

There’s no knitting news this time I’m afraid, it’s simply been to hot here. But it’s also because we are having a little building work done on the house to create some much needed extra storage, which I’m excited about, and a downstairs loo, which I’m even more excited about, as 4 adults sharing one bathroom has made for some eventful times since Amy moved back with us. It’s chaos at the moment, but I know it will be worth it once everything is done. Anyway, instead of knitting I’ve been sorting my stash and planning projects for when cooler weather arrives. This collection of yarn is my most favourite sock yarns from The Knitting Shed, it pleased me mightily to see all these beautiful shades laid out on my bed and I’m looking forward to some autumn sock knitting and getting on with my new animal design.

Well, I hope you have a good August where you are, please waft a little rain my way if you have any to spare. See you at the end of the month, hopefully with some news of knitting and wetter weather, ’til then keep well and keep finding small joys wherever you can, J x

 

countryside · crafts & knitting · foxes in my garden · garden stuff · summer · wildlife

June: a month full of life

Julie (little Cotton Rabbits)27 Comments

 

There are so many things to love about summer:

  • The long, long days, with the mid summer sun rising at 4.30am and setting just after 10pm. These 16 ½ hours of daylight (roughly double what our day length is in midwinter) are energising and there seems to be more time to get things done. And being outside in the garden in the evening, watching the sky, sitting with a cool drink and knitting, or pottering around watering plants is such a great pleasure.
  • The lush and verdant greenery all across the countryside, underfoot across the meadows and overhead in the dense leaf canopy of the woods and lanes. Every imaginable shade of glorious green, and truly beautiful.
  • The unbelievable speed with which everything grows – early June brought a decent amount of rain and coupled with the more recent sunny days everything is growing fast. The ferns in the wood for instance were only knee high in May, stunted by a dry spring, but after a month of perfect conditions they’re now shoulder height. The grasses too have shot up, and many of our familiar paths are overgrown enough to be unrecognisable.
  • Butterflies, beetles, bees and all manner of insect life. You only have to walk slowly along a hedgerow or through a meadow and you will spot hundreds of small creatures if you look carefully enough, and you can hear hundreds more chirruping and droning and buzzing away. Every plant seems a haven for some form of life.
  • Birds. All through the wood there are small dartings within the canopy and thickets, and a chorus of song drifting along the pathways, and a great many fledglings finding their wings and learning how to survive.

All of these things and more make Summer wonderful, but there is one thing that is a deal breaker for me in naming it as a favourite season, and that is the heat.

Last week we had 5 straight days of unbearably hot weather (33-36c) which we are not at all used to, making it hard to sleep, and impossible to knit. We had to choose our walks very carefully too, avoiding open countryside and sticking to the woods where the canopy protected us from the fierce direct sunlight and the temperatures are 8-10 degrees cooler. Poor Toby doesn’t enjoy this level of heat either and has had a few meltdowns, all in all it was a bit of a challenging week.

Yesterday however slightly cooler weather arrived and I gratefully picked up my needles again in the evening. Toby is a little calmer too, so we’re hoping that this weather lingers a good long while or even, dare I say it, cools further and brings rain (wishful thinking I know). I’m looking forward to continuing with the new animal pattern that I’m now working on and in the evenings am knitting several pairs of socks, all blue it seems and all stripes, the obsession continues 🙂 and thankfully there was just enough yarn to finish the pair that I was working on in May.

Hope you’ve had a better time of things where you are, but if life is a little challenging for you too at the moment, then I hope that at least you have some small pleasures to brighten each day.