Garden Friends Buffet

What you can’t see is the 2 dozen birds waiting in the hedge for me to go away!

As a gardener, I have a great deal of admiration, respect and gratitude for the plethora of wild visitors who work tirelessly to pollinate my plants and keep them free from the army of pests whose sole mission in life is to inflict as much damage as possible.

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Bees deep in clover

Sunday afternoon saw me so engrossed in potting on some beans, mange tout and flower seedlings, that I wasn’t aware of Little Mudlets’ presence until she commented on the number of bees she had seen and heard, buzzing about the lawn, as she walked towards the vegetable patch. To be honest, the remark didn’t really register until a short while later, as we were walking back to the house, when I realised that, actually, she was correct and that the lawn was indeed awash with bees busily buzzing about their business.

I’ll just have a coffee first, then I’ll start …..

Waiting for dinner, one very scruffy looking robin.

Every day for the past three or four weeks, I have walked past the flower bed outside the back door and thought to myself “Really need to get that weeded and the flowers planted out” and then almost immediately followed that thought with “I’ll just have a coffee first.”

So the weeds got left and each time I looked at the bed I knew that it was going to be that bit harder to clear it. Part of the problem was that I knew the grass, creeping ivy, ground elder and other such tenacious bullies were going to put up a bit of a fight and by the end of the day I would be sore, so very sore and I really, really don’t like pain and don’t relish the thought of inflicting it upon myself.

Friends and surprises in the garden

I thought I’d try an arty shot of a sweet corn plants

As I have wondered around my garden over the last few days, checking the progress of my plants, I have been delighted to see a host of tiny friends, busily munching their way through the thousands of aphids and blackfly, that have occupied every available bit of green. Everywhere I look I see them, these garden friends and a very welcome sight they are and whilst the Harlequin is by far the most common variety in my garden, I have seen a few Cream Spots and Two Spots hanging around as well. You see what I have in abundance at the moment are baby Ladybirds, dozens and dozens of them.

Swanning around.

To a young swan, the rain filled sand pit cover looked a lot like a pond!

What would you do if you walked into the enclosed Foundation and Year 1 play area of your school, during the half term holiday, and came face to face with a scared and angry young swan, who had mistakenly concluded that the sizeable rainwater puddle, which had formed on the sand box tarpaulin cover, was actually a pond?

Well that was the dilemma I faced last Thursday (24^th October).

Hedgehogs – a poem by Little Mudlet

The Mudlets had decided that they wanted to enter a couple of childrens’ classes at show in one of the villages nearby and so we looked through the available classes and each child chose the classes they wanted to enter.

We’ve never done anything like this before but both Mudlets have done really well, with Middle Mudlet getting a second for her vase of flowers and a first for a picture she did and Little Mudlet getting a third for her picture (they were in different age bands by the way).

There is never a Hedgehog around when you need one!

Time for a nap

We have two Hedgehogs that pass through our garden on a regular basis and Mud is convinced that the biggest of these actually lives under the caravan which currently acts as his home office. The presence of the Hedgehogs is good news for me and my garden and so I have, on the whole, refrained from putting down slug pellets, not that there has been as big a problem with slugs this year as there was last year but that is due in no small part to the lack of substantial rain.

The Wren, new shoots and the garden in July

A July morning in the vegetable patch

With August just a day or two away, the sun is still shining but interspersed with a handy rain shower or two and the plants in the vegetable patch are, for the most part, thriving.

The mangetout have fully recovered from the pigeon attacks of June, so much so that ‘pick the mangetout‘ has become an almost hourly activity for the Mudlets, with several handfuls per day making their way into the kitchen. i could really do with finding a sure fire method for preserving these – freezing them hasn’t worked in the past, as the pods are mushy and tasteless once defrosted.