We haven’t had any measurable rain for almost two months now, and some areas look like deserts. Below is one of the places where we regularly walk with Ruby. The grass alongside the path is parched and brown. Only where the grass has been kept longer does it remain green.
Memory plays tricks as we thought this year was exceptional, however, on 1 June 2020, the same area was even drier.
The following photo was taken at Clumber Park. It is the field that doubles as a parking area.
Ironically, the grass paths on the allotments keep growing and still need regular strimming.
In my last post, I bemoaned the fact that a frost had severely damaged our potato tops. Happily, they have recovered and regrown. We may have one or two misses, but most have survived and been earthed up.
To have any chance of producing any vegetables, we have to water the ever-increasing number of beds that have been planted.
We start most of our seeds in the greenhouse.
Peas are one exception. The first showing is now pushing through
Last week we made our second sowing. We scoop a trench about a spade’s width. As the ground is so dry, the trench was thoroughly watered before scattering a generous amount of pea seeds.
It may seem overkill, but this allows for any hungry creatures who decide to make a meal of the seeds. It works for us, in fact, we are still using last year’s crop from our freezer. The bed was well watered and covered with enviromesh to protect from the wood pigeons, who seem to eat or just destroy everything.
A buzzard was patrolling above the site last week, so maybe the pigeons won’t have it all their own way!
A video of the pea sowing is posted here.
Another exception is carrots which tend not to transplant well. It would be hopeless to sow carrot seeds directly into our hard clay soil, especially at the moment, and so we create a narrow trench in the soil. This was well watered before being filled with multipurpose compost. Carrot seeds were sown finely into drills created in the compost and then the drills were filled with compost and watered well. The bed was covered with an enviromesh tunnel. This will hopefully give some protection from carrotfly once the seeds begin to grow.
The ground being in the condition that the drought conditions have created leads us not to expect a good carrot crop.
We sowed two lots of carrots, one small bed and a third of a long bed. In another third of the long bed, we planted more onions and shallots.
We created shallow trenches filled with compost as we did for the carrots. The onions were a mixture of sets and seedlings. The yellow onions are grown from sets and the red ones and shallots are grown from seed. For some reason we never have any luck when we try to grow red onions from sets.
Details of all our month’s planting and sowing is posted here
Fruit has set and so we have netted as many bushes and plants as we can. Our new strawberry bed was covered about a week ago. It was a good move as on Sunday we spotted some ripe berries.
We also pulled some rhubarb.
The garden is filling with flowers. They obviously knew that it was my birthday last week. I am now as old as Martyn which he keeps reminding me of.
We will be avoiding Temple Newsam for a few weeks as they are preparing for three weeks of music events. Ugly, tall, metal fences have been erected, portaloos are springing up and construction vehicles are toing and froing along footpaths. It’s not conducive to a quiet, peaceful walk, but obviously, from the price of the tickets, it’s a good revenue stream.
I hope that the moorhen chicks like the Arctic Monkeys!
The young animals in the rare breed farm area will also have their sleep disturbed.
The youngster below has a unique feeding style.
We spent an afternoon at Clumber Park where the geese had been very busy reproducing. There were lots of goslings at various stages of development. Each brood was protected by two watchful parents.
There was a large group of goslings being supervised by three adults.
Several broods often join up to form a creche in this way, with adult birds taking turns to watch over the youngsters.
My assumption that Nostell was no longer having cattle in their meadows was wrong as electric fences have now been erected.
Clumber Park also have cattle on their land but theirs are more exotic looking.
They are English Loghorns and one was especially friendly and came up to the fence for a stroke
The red-flowered horse chestnut trees at Clumber Park also look more exotic than the more common white flowered versions growing at Nostell.
The bumble bee was well camouflaged as it browsed the flowers. Can you spot it?
As we walked around the lake, we heard something that I hadn’t heard for ages – a cuckoo. People often report that they hear cuckoos regularly, but I wonder whether what they are hearing is the coo-coo of doves.
We began our afternoon at Clumber Park by looking around the walled garden. We wanted to see how things had progressed since our last visit and also compare how their crops were doing in comparison to ours.
Finally, a big thank you to a blog pal, Debbie. Debbie has an extensive collection of cactii and succulents and very kindly sent me two epiphylum cuttings. I hope that we can raise them successfully. Pop over to Debbie’s blog to see how successful she is.
That’s all for this week, as always, until next time, stay safe and stay well.
This week, I am joining Dave’s Harvest Monday post on his Our Happy Acres blog.
That strawberry sure looks good. And it’s too bad about your drought conditions. Nature is funny – we are drowning here in too much rain and everything is parched there!
It’s a pity we can’t just share the weather around Dave.The strawberry was perfect – at least the dry conditions keep the slugs at bay
Beautiful colours and all those cute chicks! How lovely to see.
I’m glad your spuds have recovered.
I thought the red flowers are on actual chestnut trees rather than Conkers – they really are pretty
Apparently, Belinda, it is called Ruby Red horse chestnut and is a hybrid cross between a common horse chestnit and red buckeye chestnut