August & September: dry & hot, then not

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to be invaluable in a small house with 4 adult occupants, and the new house frontage looks so lovely, replacing a very outdated and tired looking 1980’s plastic porch.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