Summer's end

Hello Friends,
Hope you are all enjoying the summer. It won't be with us much longer. Our swifts have departed this week for African climes & as soon as I stepped outside this morning, I noticed that first hint of autumn lurking at the edges of the day, waiting to move in.
The garden here at 'The People & Cats Republic' is still quite colourful, but with those hot 'end of summer' shades:

Rudbeckia 'Chocolate Orange'

A very bog-standard crocosmia, but pretty nevertheless

Ligularia - but not the more usual one with spikes of flowers

Plenty of weeds too.........

This year's sunflowers - can't remember variety, but it had 'moon' in the name.

Mesembryanthemums still flowering - these remind me of the 1976 drought as they were about the only green thing left in our garden by the time the rains finally arrived!

Not sure what this is - it's always called 'Tall yellow daisy thing' in our house.

The 'Hagstones' frog community still enjoying warm pondy loveliness.........

..........and a certain white & tabby-furred gentleman is still spending a large proportion of his days like this!

 

So, summer is reaching its end, but there is still loads to do in the veggie garden. We're right in the middle of harvesting time now. We've had all the alliums (apart from spring onions), potatoes, & broad beans. We're currently cropping courgettes, tomatoes, chillies, the last of the summer lettuces, watercress & aubergines and the runner beans, peppers & beetroot won't be long. I've also sown some seeds for later crops - more lettuces, radishes, french beans, baby turnips & spinach, so still plenty of watering, weeding & hoeing to do for a good while yet. This afternoon, I'm planning to make my first chutney of the season - a Smoky Tomato Chutney, but more of my jammin' another time.

For fans of Albert Whiskers - A neighbour on the opposite side of the street has workmen ripping up her hall floor today. I happened to look out of the window & spotted Albert Whiskers (who isn't very good at camouflage except potentially on snowy days) sitting in the middle of all the power tools, boxes, planks & equipment, having clearly gone over to offer Cat Help. I hope he didn't make too much of a nuisance of himself. I know from experience that there is nothing in the world LESS helpful than Cat Help. Can only assume he was checking whether there was any ham stored under the floorboards which needed removing. There obviously wasn't, as he eventually came home & started meowing for......stewed greengages! I give up!

We're over the hump day now, so nearly the weekend. Have a good one, all.
C x

Tadpole armageddon

Hi Friends,
Yes, time to pick your brains about this year's Tadpole Armageddon......or should that be Tadpole Marie-Celeste? 
We created our wildlife pond a few years ago, while we were on strike. It was one of those strikes where picketing seemed pretty pointless, due to such a high ratio of people working in relation to strikers that any potential picket line was more likely to be a ' lone individual standing by the front door while everyone else goes in the back' situation. That was how we came to make our wildlife pond. We felt strongly about not breaking the strike, but wanted to do something meaningful with our time.

We wanted to create our pond using as many recycled & re-purposed materials as possible. We bought only a pond liner & a box of pond plants. The big hairy half of the relationship dug out the hole, which is when we discovered that out of a 30' x 130' garden, we'd picked the only spot where a previous occupant had tried to bury an entire smashed up greenhouse! We removed a wheelbarrow of broken glass, while I sieved the soil for archaeological treasure, revealing a 1960s halfpenny & half a rotting slipper. Not exactly the Staffordshire Hoard. The hole was lined with old blankets & clothing, the rocks & stones were collected from around the garden and the edging slabs were the bricks from inside a large ancient storage heater. The holey plastic baskets from a defunct electric steamer were used to plant marginals & pondy things. We were very proud of our efforts and you know what? 15 months later, we were doing it all again because I managed to spear a garden fork through the liner. Bah!!

Anyway, back to the wildlife, which started arriving the same week. Our pond has been home to frogs, toads, tadpoles, the occasional newt, water boatmen, leeches, whirlygig beetles, fearsomely bitey-looking dragonfly larvae, water snails, pond skaters and all manner of wigglers & squigglers. Every year, we have had an impressive quantity of frog spawn, followed first by a pond full of tadpoles, then the most awesome little froglets. Our froggiest year saw 18 breeding pairs of frogs spawning......& one Billy-No-Mates......who just stayed on the edge of the pond by himself, like the lad with the rupert bear trousers at the school disco. 

Now, in early March this year, the usual local froggies pitched up for the annual Hagstones Amphibians' Orgy & I counted 12 different blobs of spawn, appearing over about a 2-week period. The first blob got to the just about hatching stage, with the black dots of eggs elongating & starting to eat their way out of the jelly. Then they disappeared. They were there, then they weren't.....along with the rest of the spawn. Our adult frogs are still there....in fact, we are having a very Froggy Summer........

....but not a single tadpole in sight. We are on board the Tadpole Marie-Celeste. Imagine little floating froggy tables & chairs with miniature coffee cups still warm......... I thought we must have a significant predator lurking in the depths to polish off that lot, but a bit of pond dipping revealed nothing except a lot of extremely small larvae, probably of some sort of fly, and nothing else.
Early one morning in March, I watched a heron fly down as though to land in our garden, but at the last minute, he spotted Albert Whiskers skulking behind the black elder, so he had a change of mind & managed to get himself sufficiently airborne again to fly upwards, just clearing the top of the hedge & into our neighbour's tree. My only suggestion for the loss of every single scrap of frog spawn is that this heron had visited us before, at first light, & hoovered it up in a couple of gobbles. That beak looks like it could be a serious frogspawn hoover. Would herons eat it? I've no idea. There are no fish in our pond, so no obvious reason for him (or her... because our equality policy extends to the local heron population here at the People & Cats Republic) to visit.

Or were there some pondy predators in there which snarfed the spawn & were then duly snapped up in turn to become heron breakfast? Eat or be eaten. That kind of thing.

Another curious thing, probably unrelated,but who knows? All summer pond dippings have continued to net up nothing except a few small wormy things resident in the mud on the bottom. No water boatmen, no dragonfly nymphs, no snails, no beetles & only 2 pond skaters this year (though the duckweed is probably putting those off at the moment). Our pond is usually teeming with life, so this is very odd. 

We do need to do some replanting, & clearing, so we're planning to give the pond a thorough clean-out this autumn. Will that provide any clues? 

Thankfully, there is one predator whom on this occasion at least, is blameless.......

.......even though he does rather look like he's eaten all the pies in this photo.

So that's our sad tadpole mystery. Sad because no tadpoles means no froglets this year, so we won't have any new additions to our much-treasured froggy commune & I'll miss seeing small armies of them embarking on their first journey out of the water into the flower beds. Better luck next year & I'll leave you with a cheery picture of a plant I know only as 'Bear's Britches' & one of our many lovely self-seeded foxgloves.

Hope all the veggie gardeners among you are getting some good crops. I picked our first aubergine of the year the other day & have already frozen lots of chillies. Good gardening......& ponding,
Till next time,
C x