countryside · foxes in my garden · summer · wildlife

July: from green to brown

Julie (little Cotton Rabbits)4 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 find 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.

countryside · crafts & knitting · garden stuff · in the woods · spring · wildlife

May: the fairest month of all

Julie (little Cotton Rabbits)24 Comments

Peak spring arrives with May, and it’s beautiful out there in the countryside. Although as this spring has been a very dry season many of the trees have noticeably less leaves, so the canopy is currently quite open compared to the full density that you would see after a damp spring. I keep hoping for rain, and we have had a little in May, but not nearly enough.

The lack of rain has also affected the orchard, where there the apple blossom was a lot more sparse than I have seen in some previous years. The hardy hawthorns though have been glorious, and in full bloom from the beginning of the month. The hawthorn tree is woven into folklore and social history, and prevalent in the countryside. Lone hawthorn trees have long been viewed as portals to the fairy realm, and to cut one down was considered to bring bad luck.  And the hawthorn also symbolises love, fertility and protection, with medieval May brides often carrying a posy of hawthorn blossom, also called May blossom, or wearing it in their hair, and branches of blossoming hawthorn hung over doorways to invite luck and prosperity in for May day or Beltane at the start of the month.

Hawthorn also has an English traditional rural name of ‘bread and cheese’ as the plentiful and tender new shoots were foraged and eaten by country folk in bygone times when winter food stores were running low. There is a lane near to one of our walks named Bread and Cheese Lane which still has many hawthorns along the hedgerows there.

Although there seem to be less leaves on many trees the oaks have noticeably larger leaves this year, some almost the size of my hand. Last year was a mast year for the oak trees and they produced enormous numbers of acorns, which takes a huge amount of tree energy, so in the year following a mast year they concentrate energy into leaf and branch growth rather than seed production, which is why many oak leaves this year are supersized.

The hornbeam trees however seem to have decided on this year for their peak seed spreading, as most are festooned with delicate samaras, the winged seeds that will disperse on autumn breezes, they look so pretty swinging from the branches.

Back at home there has of course been knitting, some work on patterns, and more socks. The pair I’m currently working on are knitted in precious stashed yarn from the Wool Barn (sadly Maya is no longer producing hand-dyed yarn) and I’m leaning into my slight obsession for simple stripes. I am playing yarn chicken and hoping that I have enough of the soft blue colour to finish the second sock, it seems to be running out more quickly that anticipated :/

Most of the rest of my free time is still taken up with rebuilding this blog, though I am now only a single years worth of posts away from completing the task. You may remember that my former blogging service typepad closed with very little warning last October and although I was able to import all of the written posts into this new blog here I have had to manually go through and add in all of the images to those posts. There are over 900 posts, and thousands of images so as you might imagine it has been a very time consuming task. But it has also been a rewarding one and I have greatly enjoyed looking back over the last 19 years worth of images. Something that hit me quite hard though was how much life has changed since Toby left school and looking back at images of how family life used to be brought into sharp focus how much less time I have these days to spend on the things that I used to enjoy such as baking and gardening and just pottering around, but I am now trying to weave those small pleasures back into my days again.

Seeing the pictures of how our garden used to look here and here, full of plants and small creatures, made me realise just how much I have missed having a pretty outdoor space that is helpful to nature. Gardening has been absent from my days for quite a few years now and the garden has become a little neglected, so a few new plants have now been added, along with a small bed of herbs, it is a modest start but it will hopefully continue.

Our neighbourhood has suffered greatly from habitat loss over the last 10 years. When we moved here 30 years ago every garden had several small trees and lots of shrubs and most had vegetable patches and varied flower beds. As the older generation have died or moved away these mature and wildlife rich gardens, sometimes lovingly tended for 40 years or more, have been completely decimated by the new neighbours in favour of fence-to-fence lawn (in some cases even the plastic kind) and decking and one neighbour has entirely paved over the whole of their back garden. Gardens are such a vital habitat and source of food for all manner of insect, amphibian and small mammal life, and although our garden is small, I hope to make a better space for nature to flourish a little here at our home. There is at least one wild creature that does enjoy spending time in our garden, Katsue the fox is still a regular visitor and continues doing well after her injury earlier in the year,

Well, I’m off to water the new plants, they need it with this lack of rain, until next time keep well and happy, J x