Category: summer

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

June: a month full of life

Julie (little Cotton Rabbits)25 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 · in the woods · summer · wildlife

August: Autumn comes early

Julie (little Cotton Rabbits)86 Comments

 

Hello there, this is the first blog post from my new blogging home over on wordpress (all previous posts are copies from my former typepad blog), so if you are a subscriber and receiving it by email I have my fingers crossed that this reaches you, and finds you well.

At the beginning of August we had a return to hot and dry conditions here and that has once again had a big impact on the woods and countryside, accelerating season change. As Toby and I walk through the woods now, great drifts of leaves are loosened from the trees at the slightest breath of breeze. But they are not like the leaves that normally fall in autumn, instead they are baked brown, sun-shrivelled and dry as paper. Each footfall sounds a crisp crunch and there is no hope of us surprising any unsuspecting wildlife for a brief encounter, as they hear us coming a mile away.

Autumn come so soon, leaves me feeling a little melancholy. Summer has been harsh this year, and so tough on the trees and wildlife. Everything has been hanging on, rather than flourishing.

One of the nice things though about late summer wood walks is finding feathers, pine cones and other discarded treasures from the forest floor. This year I’ve added to my feather collection with a host of spotted woodpecker feathers, all found together from a kill, most likely a sparrowhawk; a couple of pheasant feathers; a long green woodpecker feather; and lots of tawny owl feathers. I also found a beautifully speckled moorhen egg along the riverbank. And already there are a lot of fungi appearing in the woods, some of them like the ‘chicken of the woods’ sulphur polypore are rather spectacular, you don’t get a sense of scale in the photo above but it was easily 2ft across. I’m hoping it will be a good season for fungi as I get quite excited to see all the different types that appear in the woods around us.

Back at home I’ve been knitting lots again: socks and a little neckerchief scarf in autumny colours; and I’ve also been making some animals to photograph for new front covers of my earlier patterns: the rabbits, elephants, foxes and mice. I’ll keep you posted about progress and updates to the existing patterns.

My main focus at the moment though is getting my images permanently imported into the old blog posts in this new blog home (as images will otherwise disappear at the end of september when typepad shut down)

So far I am making good progress, all of my tutorial posts now have secured images, and every single post from July 2025 to January 2023 also now have permanent images. Next I will be prioritising posts about knitting and patterns and then my nature and wildlife posts (you can find all of these categories and more on the sidebar of my blog page). I will be working backwards chronologically and will not stop until the majority of my blog posts have permanent images. I am pretty sure I now have all of the images saved in order to be able to achieve that.

If you have any favourite posts of mine that you would also like me to prioritise please do let me know in the comments above (scroll to the top of the post or reply to the emailed version of this blog post to leave a comment). I will do my best to accommodate any requests.

Well, I’ll be back later in the month, I still have a pending post about knitted decreases, the companion piece to my knitting increases post earlier this year, I hope to finish that soon and I will be pattern writing again, though dividing my time between that and blog reconstruction will mean it is a slow process.

Very best wishes and thank you as always for accompanying me on my blogging journey here in my new home, J xx

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

July: High Summer

Julie (little Cotton Rabbits)4 Comments

 

 

The beginning of July was so very hot and dry here, too hot to sleep comfortably or to knit in the daytime, and so dry that the countryside was soon looking very parched. The cows knew something though (cows lying down is supposedly a sign that rain is imminent) and by the middle of the month the welcome rain did sweep in, bringing freshness and quenching the countryside back to a lush green again. Toby and I have enjoyed our regular walks so much more in the welcome cooler temperatures, and he has slept better too – he is so restless on very hot nights and often up wondering around the house, meaning that one of us needs to be up with him too, so it’s been nice to have some unbroken rest again.

Since launching the squirrels patterns at the beginning of the month I’ve been taking things slowly; starting my quiet days with breakfast in bed and some simple sock knitting; tidying and organising the kitchen a little; pottering around without much of an aim and generally enjoying nothing much on my to do list other than taking care of Toby.

Well, there’s not much else to report from here really. Summer is my least favourite season but even so there are always things to delight in, I’ve detailed some of them below in my monthly nature notes.

I hope that you’re comfortable and content where you are,

J x

 

Nature notes from July:

  • Week 1:  So hot and dry, uncomfortably so at daytime temps of 32 degrees and night time above 20 degrees
  • Week 2:  An amazing sight on the evening of July 10th when a cloud of ladybirds flew over, many thousands by the look of it, many settled on the hawthorn hedging where there were quite a lot of aphids to feed on. I have never seen so many at one time, the air was thick with them for around half an hour
  • Week 3:  Rain and cooler temperatures arrive, so very welcome and Toby and I happily walk in the light rain
  • Week 4:  All of the branches of the plum tree in our garden are weighed down under the enormous weight of a bumper crop this year. I’ve also noticed that the wild plum trees are also bowed over by the abundance of their fruit. Other things that I’ve noticed many more of this year than usual are insects and butterflies, especially the Ringlet (most years I only see a handful but they have been most numerous this year). It must be down to the hot and dry conditions throughout spring, favouring certain species and bringing about a greater number than usual.