All creatures great and small

14 Cabbage White caterpillars

Those stoic few of you who visit our blog will know that Coco and I love all things living that come to our garden be they welcome guests or otherwise. 

Some unwelcome visitors are the Cabbage White caterpillars that have stripped our Brussel sprouts almost back to the roots.

Mature Cabbage White caterpillar

But that said, we do enjoy watching the butterflies meandering through the garden and of course the butterflies and caterpillars are part of the food chain and they keep the birds coming to the garden.

Some other pesty critters are the wasps, although despite there being hundreds of them we have remained unstung so far. 

Jarvis

In a morbid kind of way the wasp is a fascinating creature and to those of you who ask 'what use are they?' we would answer, they are the waste disposal units of the insect world.

We have two cats who are prolific hunters of small rats, mice and voles and they regularly leave remnants of mice on the lawn. 

The wasps dissect the remains and take relatively large chunks away with them, they also indiscriminately nibble every apple on our trees!

Bee and Hover Fly

Spider at night

Welcome visitors include spiders and all insects that remove the blackfly, whitefly, and other unwanted guests and of course the bees and hover flies that pollinate our plants.


We've had a few other exciting happenings at the garden,  I mentioned before the very poor quality shed we had delivered and sent back the same day. 

Our Hallgate timber shed

Well our new shed arrived from Hallgate Timber in Long Sutton in Lincolnshire, their website is www.hallgate-timber.co.uk.

Some of you will know that I am a carpenter by trade and if I was going to build myself a shed I would build one just like the one from Hallgate Timber.  The service was brilliant, the quality excellent, the price was good and it feels and looks right.

Sweetcorn

On the harvesting side of the garden we have been eating our own carrots, onions, potatoes, runner beans, purple kale, swedes, radishes and salad leaves for some time now.  But the highlight to date has to be our sweetcorn they are DELICIOUS!!!!!!

Coco eats them straight from the husk having peeled it like a banana.


Plant wise we have now put out our spring greens, which are a special request of Great Nanny Mero.  She has pestered us for ages to get some sown and ready for spring.

We also have some more peppers and chillis growing in the potting shed and waiting for the new poly tunnel to be put up.  It's on my list of high priority jobs to do.  Sadly above High Priority I have an Extremely High Priority list and above that a Very Extremely High Priority list.

Above that is the 'Nanny Southwellski Job list' that Coco and I are working our way through at the moment.  The only trouble is that when we finish one job for Nanny Southwellski she adds 2 more!

On a lighter note Coco's walking is improving every day and she seldom sits down and shuffles anywhere now, this has brought a whole new awareness on us that means we have to move everything to higher ground.

I'm a Nanny! Get me out of here!

When we show Coco something for the first time, be it how to eat a different food, put her shoes on or how a new toy works we generally show her how and what to do. 

Nanny Southwellski thought it would be a good idea to show Coco how to go through the play tunnel. It has taken nearly a week for her shoulder to get better.

Its been a long time.......

since I was last here, Mr B dying has hit us all really hard and still we have a few moments where its still too sad for words. 

But in the garden life has continued be it plants or weeds and they are all growing at an alarming pace, especially now we have had some rain. Its odd that as a gardener I can irrigate my plot yet in some parts of Norfolk farmers aren't allowed to take water from the rivers and drains and yet we still use clean, drinking quality water to flush toilets.

We have had the best of the strawberries on the plot although the plants in the forest garden seem to be a bit behind and are just fruiting. We have noticed that in the forest garden the strawberry plants have grown taller and the fruit is larger than those in the cultivated plot.
 

Jarvis keeping watch

So much so that they have become a target for the blackbirds, I don't like to use a lot of netting in the garden in case the brids get tangled up in it although I do use it around the peas to give support and protect them.

Luckily we have our own security patrols, see left, in the shape of Jarvis and KC our two cats. They tend to be a better deterrent than netting or any of the flappy things I tie across the plot.

Brutus - as handsome as ever!

Brutus is doing well, his flock now numbers 8 since we lost a couple of hens to natural causes.

The eggs are still coming, but predicting how many we will get each day is a bit like picking the lottery numbers.  There were three today so the chooks have had a stern warning and been told if production doesn't go up there will be redundancies!

We have given the chooks a much larger run, they can wander about quite freely and in perfect safety.  I think this may be the reason the eggs production has dropped.  They get nosing about their run and forget why they are there!

Gooseberries

Cherries

Our fruit trees and bushes are looking good,
we have loads of cherries on the old tree and gooseberries on the old bush in the main garden.

The new gooseberry bushes are a little choked up by grass at the moment but its on my list.

White grapevine

We also have 4 grape vines planted in the plot and these have taken really well and throwing out lots of new growth so posts and wires will be needed pretty soon. 

We have two red grapes and two white so we will have to see how productive they are before we launch 'Chateau Southwellsi' on the wine loving public. 

Peas - the first pods!

Our peas that we started in the potting shed way back in March are now producing their first pods, we have planted some more seeds and these are now peeping through and will hopefully continue the crop for a few weeks.

We will plant another set of seeds in about three to four weeks time.

We have done repeated sowings with a number of crops by way of an experiment to see if we can gauge when we have stuff ready so that we don't get it all at once.

Radish

We learnt from experience with the lettuces not to sow too many at once as we had a whole row go to waste (although the chooks would disagree) because we couldn't eat them fast enough.

The same thing with the radishes.  I am the only one who really likes them but I just can't eat that many and I was pleased to give some away tonight to friends who visited.

I hope to get into the plot tomorrow and do some serious weeding and thinning out but we'll see what the weather has planned first.

Tyred and tired!

My M10 Tank Destroyer

The lighter mornings and evenings have meant that Coco has changed her clock and our day now starts at anything from 6.00am to 6.45am.

So when Uncle Robin came over for modelling club last night (not that kind of modelling, miniature military modelling! See right), we arranged to meet him at Listers Farm this morning and collect a tractor tyre to use in the play area of our garden as a sandpit. We thought it would make our morning go quicker.

So we got up nice and early, did our chores of letting the dogs out, feeding and watering the chooks and feeding the cats before getting our breakfast ready. Now at just over thirteen months old you will probably wonder what Coco's role in all this is, well, she strokes the dogs and cats, puts the chicken food in a cup for me, (some of it actually gets in the cup as well!) and tells Brutus the cockerel to be quiet by giving him a really loud "Ah!".

Waiting to go

After breakfast we set off in the van and went along a very bumpy dirt track to get onto the road to Uncle Robin's farm at Southery.  Coco was jolted about in her car seat like jelly on a plate and she laughed and chuckled all the way.

I need a cushion!

We got to the farm and had a look at and in all the tractors, Mr Bumble our Norwich terrier came with us and he was soon searching for rats around the farm buildings, he didn't find any though.

Coco had a sit in the cab of Uncle Robin's tractor and wasn't phased at all, even when Uncle Robin sounded the horn. When we look at Coco's books at bedtime we call every tractor Uncle Robin's so this probably prepared her for seeing them.

Piece of cake!

We didn't get to go in the biggest tractor because that had been used for spraying and we didn't want little fingers getting into contact with it.

We then went to choose a tractor tyre for the sandpit and found one that was nearly as tall as me. The tyre only just fitted in the back of our van and was very dirty but with a wash we are sure it will make a fine sandpit.

Once we got home we had toast and it was time for Coco's nap so I did a bit of potting-on in the potting shed and put my plants out to harden off.

My Morning Glory plants were a picture of health and vibrant green happiness and sitting there in the sun they made me feel very proud.

When I came back about an hour later there were fourteen leafless stems sitting in moist compost and one very smug looking chook! I explained the process of stuffing a chook prior to cooking and the smugness disappeared, she'll not do that again! I should add that no harm was done to the chook in any way what so ever, however that does not mean it wasn't thought!

With that I worked on the fence between the chook run and the front drive.

It's a real joy to be outside and again I thank the stars that I am lucky enough to be able to do it almost whenever I want, jobs for Nanny Southwellski permitting of course. Having said that as we are planning to increase our level of self sufficiency it is important that we get the work done outside.

Faster Grandpa

I mentioned our turf disaster well it's starting to come good, I think, or is it wishful thinking.

In the picture you can see the turf,  it looks worse on the photograph than it actually is, honest!

Coco and I had just come through the forest garden from the bottom veggie plot where we had just put the canes in for the runner beans and prepared some ground for our parsnips.

Our veggies are looking good and the seeds in the potting shed, which I also use as a greenhouse, are coming up nice and strong.

It's truly amazing to spend an hour or so in there of a morning and then return later in the day to find that the tray of compost that has sat there for two weeks is suddenly alive with green shoots.

I recently planted two plastic barrels with Charlotte potatoes, and they have since yesterday sent up strong dark green leaf clusters. Never tried this method of growing before and as the previous occupants here have left a number of tatty grey plastic barrels around  I thought recycle and re-use!

On the note of recycling, whilst Coco and I were at the farm this morning Uncle Robin said we could have some old car tyres as well, I said "No" initially but something he said last night about worm compostors and tyres being good for that purpose has made me rethink and I will be looking around the garden tomorrow to see where we could put them.

It's the Royal Wedding on Friday so we are having a few friends over for a wedding watching and a barbecue. It's almost beyond belief that some groups asked for permission to protest outside Westminster Abbey on the day of the wedding, how do they think that will help their cause? Ah well, it's a funny of world innit!

Hopefully it won't rain, although we desperately need some for the garden, especially the turf I laid this week.

Sunset over the weaves.

I took the dogs into the paddock this evening for a game of ball and found myself just watching the sun slowly sink and leave the most beautiful sunset, suddenly the Morning Glory plants weren't that important after all.