I haven’t blogged for a while as I’ve been up to my ears in university work. My final assessment of this semester was submitted on Tuesday morning. I spent the rest of that day in stunned silence. I’m sure my tutors would like to think it was mental exhaustion. Actually, I was more wistful than tired. By this time next year, my course will be over. I’m having such a great time, I wish it could go on forever!
After some reviving tea and cake, I managed to make it out into the garden on Tuesday afternoon. We’ve had only one or two short bursts of rain over the past few weeks, but weeds made the most of it. While I’ve been locked in the library or chained to my desk, a green tide has swept in across my vegetable patch. I’ve now got to try and stem the flood.
Our winter flowering honeysuckle was covered in bees during the dark days of January and February. It is now putting on lots of fresh green growth, making it almost impossible to push between it and the row of tanks holding any rain water which drains from the eastern side of Tottering Towers’s roof. The rule about cutting back early flowering shrubs such as this and forsythia is that you do it as soon as the flowers have faded. That way the plants are stimulated into making lots of new shoots which will flower next year.
First thing this morning, I took a saw and secateurs out to attack the honeysuckle…and had to bring them straight back in again! I always check before starting any job like that to make sure I won’t disturb any nesting birds. Sure enough, I spotted the bright eyes of a hen blackbird watching me over the rim of her nest. She looked exactly like the bird in the photo below by Heinz Melion, (via Pixabay) although this nest is in a conifer. I backed off, and left well alone.
We’ve got quite a few nest-boxes dotted around the garden, and almost all are being used by busy house sparrows, robins, and titmice of all sorts. One nest box hangs on the north wall of our house, only yards from the kitchen door. We pass it dozens of times every day, and both the cat and dog are never far away. A little while ago this box was investigated by a pair of nuthatches. I never thought they’d use it. There’s a constant stream of people and animals going backwards and forwards past it but they still settled in. They’ve raised a family to the noisy stage, so —fingers crossed— there will be plenty of nuthatches in our wood this year. The parents are flying in with food on average once every seven minutes, from dawn until duck. That means we have to leave and return to the kitchen carefully. We wait until a parent bird has either just popped in to feed their chicks, or popped out on its next hunting trip!
The garden plants and nestlings might be changing fast, but some things are the same all year round. DD got up for work at 5am this morning , and looked out of the kitchen window to see a wild boar rooting along the outside of our boundary fence!