Peanut thief

Autumn apples

Our apples are fantastic this year.  Such a pity that we don't use them all, but sadly no time for juicing and little time to make apple chutney!

September harvest!

My patch.

Last year, as an antidote to council activities,  I decided to have a go at growing a few vegetables and I have been astonished at the results!

I decided to contain my efforts by buying a raised bed, which somehow made the whole idea less daunting.  I could persuade myself that this was little more than a large window box!  I also told myself that I should not get too downhearted about failure.  I had little clue about what I was doing but no doubt would learn from my mistakes.

I sowed three crops in a space that is 4 feet by 6.  Almost half of the bed is taken up by some french beans. I actually prefer these to runner beans. I think they are more versatile since they can be eaten hot or cold.  They also don't need support in theory, but the plants are a bit floppy.  I am not sure what to do about this and any suggestions would be very welcome.  They have cropped well though giving us enough beans for several meals, and really do taste better than the shop bought ones.

I have also grown some rainbow chard, which can be eaten raw or cooked like spinach. The taste is a bit soapy when raw, but it mixes in well with other leaves, and the plants keep on giving more,

Finally I have some beetroot coming on.  At present results are a bit patchy, with some plants clearly forming a good root but others still looking a bit skinny. I do love beetroot however, and  I am looking forward to enjoying some borscht later in the year, and also mixing the beets up with horseradish for eating with roast beef and smoked fish, just like my granny used to do!

I am thinking of getting another bed in order to try some carrots and strawberries next year.

The Jogger

Every morning, except when I have a really early start, I take Rendle the Lurcher out for his morning constitutional.

It is a real pleasure on most days, even when it is raining, because the world, while recognisably the same, is also subtly different each day, and the dog's renewed enthusiam for life is encouraging.

The joy of being out and about in the countryside at any time is that there are lots of other dogwalkers to meet and greet.  In addition there are the other regulars; the local farmer on his way to get his paper down in Acton, the dustmen, the regular commuters.  All are there with a friendly wave, a 'good morning'; sometimes there is time for a conversation.

Every so often I meet 'the jogger'.  Lycra clad, she ploughs doggedly on, earphones in place, oblivious it seems to the outside world.  I sometimes attempt to greet her with a 'good morning', or more, but she does not recognise the attempt.

She has been a feature of my morning walks now for over a year, and I find her failure to connect depressing; depressing to such an extent that my heart sinks as I see her approach.

I know that she is a woman who works in London.  We can see her home from our house. She has done a deal with her company whereby she can work at home in Suffolk so many days a week. I do not blame her for that.  She also covers an impressive mileage every day.   But all the same I have to ask: is it due to her intrinsic urbanity that she cannot recognise a fellow human being with a nod, or a 'good morning'?  Or am I just old fashioned to expect the rural courtesy of recognition?

Bees find a home

A year or so ago we bought this bee home and hung it on the side of the new kitchen.  The wooden tube aims to attract solitary, non swarming bees, such a mason bees,  which these days find it harder to find places to live.  Apparently they are great pollinators!

The home faces east because the bees like to enjoy the warmth of the morning sun.

Nothing much happened last year, and we rather gave up hope.

However, now that the sun has come out, and we are spending more time outside, we have noticed that mason bees have now colonised the home and are flying in and out quite happily.  Nick is busy ordering another tube as I write.

Not the best day for.......

Changing the windows!

Pond update

I was pleased to see the article about George Millins, who lives in Great Waldingfield,  in the Suffolk Free Press on Thursday.  George has done a lot to encourage me and many other people to think harder about finding ways to conserve the wildlife that we enjoy so much in Suffolk.  As regular readers will know he has contributed informative and interesting articles to this website from time to time for which I am always very grateful.

It was in part inspired by George that Nick and I decided some time ago now to create a pond in our garden, and I have also written about progress here from time to time.  The pond is now well established, as can be seen above, although it gets a bit like vegetable soup from time to time!

One disappointment has been that the enthusiasm of ducks for the pond, particularly in the spring, has meant that frogs have not established themselves.  I understand that this is because the ducks eat the spawn.  Rendle the Lurcher takes some interest in the ducks and sometimes chases them off, but they know that he is not very serious about the task and don’t fly very far before returning.  We do however have a fine variety of bug life and have seen newts from time to time.   Many other birds, besides the ducks, find the pond an excellent place for their morning bath.

In today’s East Anglian Daily Times there is an article about the intention to promote areas of wildflowers in public places in Sudbury.  I hope that this will please George since he has long campaigned for public areas to be allowed to be a little less tidy for the sake of our fellow creatures. I have to say that I agree with this view, and Babergh officers are also keen on the idea,  but such initiatives do not always please residents.  I doubt if I will ever be asked to judge a Best Kept Village Competition.

Behind the pond in the picture above you may be able to see the area of our garden that we encourage to grow wild.  At the suggestion of Dr Taylor from Branchlines, we only cut this once a year, doing half in July and the other half in the autumn.  This has the effect of encouraging the growth of different types of plants in each section.

In addition to listening to people like George and Dr Taylor, there is lots of information on the internet about how you can make your garden more wildlife friendly.

Pond Life

Nick has been working hard on the pond, scooping out a lot of dead oxygenating plants that perished during the cold winter, and trying to bring the bulrushes, which have appeared uninvited, under some sort of control.

He has tried out all sorts of specialist instruments to undertake these aquatic tasks, but has finally concluded that the best thing to use is a good old garden rake. In fact one ‘pond expert’ website agrees that a rake is the best implement for many pond related jobs.  It would be good if someone could create a model with an extra long handle however.

As the spring has progressed we have noticed quite a lot of insect life on warm evenings, which clearly pleases the newts. 

A couple of days ago Nick claimed to have seen a shrimp in the water!

I was very excited, anticipating getting the frying pan and the thai spices out, but knew really that it couldn’t be a proper prawn.  In fact it was a ‘nymph’ .  Readers may be disappointed to learn that these are not the nymphs found in fairy tales, (the sort that have a habit of falling for human princes and coming to a bad end on dry land).  They are the larvae of the dragonfly, of which we had a good many last year and are anticipating a lot more in 2011.

Newts!

And after the ducklings came the newts!  Nick noticed the little fellows in the pond the other evening and we have had some good sightings since.

They really take me back to my childhood in Warwickshire when we had a large pond with lots of newts.  I remember how they occasionally come up to the surface to have a bit of a look at you before rapidly disappearing.

They are quite shy and seem to be able to hear us, but at night we can go out with a torch and have a good look at them.

A nice fact is that the mother newt wraps up each egg in pond weed or a leaf to camouflage it before it hatches.

I understand that some friends have discovered the rare Great Crested newt in their pond at Thorpe Morieux, but we are delighted to be playing host to the more common Smooth variety.

Ducklings!

Our pond may not have attracted much in the way of frogs and other amphibians yet, but we have plenty of ducklings again!

This morning's snow

How lovely it was this morning walking the dog at around 8 a.m. when the snow was lying unspoilt on the ground and no-one was about.

I was amazed to see that a snow plough had been round overnight and so the lane down to Cuckoo Tye was quite walkable, although very icy. I think that it must have been one of the local farmers, who have been roped in to help on these occasions by the County Council. Thanks a lot to him or her for turning out!




I am rather frustrated because these pictures of our garden, taken this morning, would have been great for this year's Christmas Card. This featured a picture of the house, but since the photo was taken in November, as can be seen below it was completely snow free. The berries on the holly bush were plentiful and red though, and it seems that the old saying about a lot of berries meaning a cold winter has proved right this year.

Sorry for any inconvenience!

I am sorry if anyone is inconvenienced by the closure of the road through Newmans Green on Monday and Tuesday of next week.

It is, I am afraid, all our fault. The other half of our house, Studio Cottage, is having its own water supply installed and Anglian Water need to dig up the road to connect it. Until now the residents of the cottage have received their water courtesy of us! We only discovered this when a workman cut off our water a few years ago and cut Studio Cottage off at the same time.

We now want to instal a water meter, and don't really want to pay for someone else's water!

Straw towers

I really like harvest time. The fields are suddenly busy with tractors, people and dogs. I am even generally happy to sit behind slow moving farm implements, regarding it as all part of living in the country.

The harvest this year has seemed to be more frenetic than usual. This is due, I think, to the difficult weather conditions and also the need to bale up as much straw as possible. The hay harvest was not good, and animal feed is in short supply.

Almost overnight great towers of straw have sprung up all around the house, looking like fortifications and making the fields seem strangely geometric.

Snow in Suffolk

The picture taken of our garden early this morning is to remind readers of the blog in far flung places like Australia, California and Mozambique of what snow looks like!

Dahlias and Great Dixter

I managed to lose all my dahlias this year by foolishly putting the tubers up in the loft rather than in the, generally recommended, boxes of compost in the garage. It was far too dry up there, and when I came to plant them out in May I found that instead of tubers all I had left was a shrivelled heap of dust. This was a great setback. I am very fond of dahlias since I think that they look great at this time of the year when everything else is beginning to fade. I have always liked them, even during the period when they were considered vulgar by all the people trying to emulate Sissinghurst white borders and muted borders full of shades of lilac and pink.
Undaunted by this catastrophe, and too mean to buy growing plants at the garden centre, I sent off for a collection of tubers from a grower, although I was aware that it was a little late. All went well until recently when a few finally started to flower and I discovered that instead of the claret and purples that I had ordered a fair few have turned out to be an unloveable shade of tomato scarlet. I have resisted the temptation to pull them out however, but am only slightly cheered when people exclaim that they are so bright that they can see them from the road which is about fifty yards away.
It was therefore cheering last week to visit Great Dixter, the late Christopher Lloyd’s fantastic garden in Sussex. There is no worry about bright colours here! Although quite a long way it really is worth the trip, and at this time of year a real treat for dahlia lovers.
Some of the vistas are illustrated above and below.

Ducks galore!

I am going to ignore the news about the further postponement of Local Government Reorganisation since firstly this is very well covered in the EADT and secondly something far more interesting happened this morning.

Our new pond has attracted quite a lot of wildlife at once! We looked out of our bedroom window to see the duck who has been visiting the pond on a regular basis now has eleven ducklings, pictured above.

I fear that local cats and other predators will make their future rather uncertain. The first task is to persuade Rendle the Lurcher that he shouldn't regard them as playthings.

No smoke without fire!

Great excitement yesterday afternoon when I noticed that a lot of smoke was coming out of the chimney when the fire in the grate below was barely alight!
Having sought a second opinion from my neighbours, I phoned 999 with a sinking heart. Visions of burly men with large hoses dowsing our lovely house flashed through my mind.
Within 7 minutes or so the Fire Brigade from Long Melford hurtled along Mills Lane with blue light flashing, attracting most of the local children and the attention of several dogs.
We’re not quite sure what caused the chimney fire. It was right up at the top of the stack and apparently was pretty hot. The cause was probably a bit of bitumen from the small amount of wood that we burn which had attached itself to the inside of top of the chimney over time.
I have to say that the service from the emergency services both on the telephone and from the firemen (all part timers) was absolutely fantastic. The five men did their utmost to do as little damage as possible and were totally supportive. They made some good down to earth suggestions about how to avoid a similar fire happening again, recommending throwing a glass (no more) of water on the fire below as first aid when a chimney fire is suspected. Once the fire was out we all had a cup of tea and the fire engine returned to Long Melford.
I won’t say that it was a totally stress free experience, but I do think we are really lucky to have such a great fire service. A big thank you to you all!