A new roof

The thatching is going really well and has been an amazing experience.  I am so glad that the birds had all finished breeding - there are a lot of sparrows that nest in the eaves.  The thatching material is water reed, from Hungary.  It would have been wheat straw years ago, and I wonder if cottages here were ever thatched with common rush which grows so well - we have lots of it in various damp spots.  The ridge of the roof will be perfectly plain, following the typical old Devon style.

A moth with a hook on its back

This little moth settled on our door - we could not tell whether the pronounced hook that curved up was an appendage, or the moth's own tail, curled over its back.  Googling didn't help either!  Maybe someone will recognise it.

Living together

This jackdaw will have to look elsewhere for a new home now that our gable end is repaired.  There is new bargeboard and the 'wiggly tin' has all been sorted out and red oxide painted, as is traditional here.  The roof that the jackdaw is standing on will soon be newly thatched.  There are plenty of other places available for these birds, who have finished breeding for this year, and there is a limit to what we are prepared to put up with in the name of wildlife preservation.

Summer's come....and it's all go

What a change in the weather from last week - it's been really hot and it looks as if the fine weather may coincide with our thatching which is just about to start.  The scaffolding's up, which meant Paul could finish a couple of jobs on part of the roof, adding new bargeboard.  I took the opportunity of the temporary hole to throw this huge collection of twigs out of our roofspace.  It's jackdaws that have done this - we have seen it before when they are trying to build a nest.  They find a small hole that they think is suitable but don't understand the necessity for some sort of ledge, immediately inside, for the twigs to land on.  They simply keep on posting sticks through the hole which drop to the floor below (or, as in the case of a chimney, down to our register plate) and they never manage to make their nest.  If there was a ledge, they would stop when there were just s few sticks laid and get on with the egg-laying.

Rain, Ringlets and Rabbits

We had an impromptu barbecue on which the sun shone and the rain fell in equal measures.

The blackbirds that nest in the workshop complained about the activity/not being able to to get in under the door, and we had to decamp to further over in the yard.  It seems a good time was had by all, and we went for a nice ramble during which Darren took this great photograph of a Ringlet butterfly.  There are very many, fluttering out of the grasses as we walk.

  He also got a lovely shot of one of our wild bunnies who are always out on our back lawn.  They've had a scary couple of days with a visiting dog whose sole aim in life seemed to be to eat one of them. Our old dog doesn't bother about them at all.

Roses

We've had a very warm day and all the grass has been cut including the field path, which was very difficult with long sappy growth after all the rain.
This rose on our 9' wall is always spectacular.  It is "Bobbie James", a huge rambler which we have two of, the other one is climbing a couple of small trees at the bottom of the yard.   It has huge trusses of flower; one stem this year with 100 buds on it.  The bright pink rose is a suckering Rugosa which pops up all along just there and even on the other side of the wall.  There is honeysuckle all mixed up with it so the evening scent is lovely.

Jackdaws, Wood Pigeons and Spotted Flycatchers (and a moth)

The pair of jackdaws are still going in and out of the hole in our eaves and I managed to get a photo of one just coming out, you can see the silhouette against the cream colour, and its wings are pinned back within the hole.  Its mate watches from the end of the roof.  The youngsters have finally fledged after days of encouragement from the parents - lots of cawing and demonstrations of how to do it, and a baby's head would appear at the hole, as if to say "You've got to be joking...jump out of here? No way!" but they did it in the end.

Three days ago I spotted a large Poop in the middle of our yard.  Closer inspection could not identify the culprit - it was big enough to have been done by our dog but entirely the wrong colour and anyway he always discreetly backs into the flower beds.  It was black and white with a squiggle at the end and a blob underneath (yes how sad am I) and looked more poultry-like than anything, not fox, we thought pheasant maybe.  Paul cleared it up, but we were very surprised to see another in the same place, almost identical, yesterday morning.  A trawl of the Internet suggested Wood Pigeon - somebody else describing a similar scat, deposited in roughly the same place over several days, and they had actually witnessed the crime!  Very odd, and today there is ANOTHER ONE!  Not quite so big this time!
(Monday update - no poop today).

This is the nest of a pair of Spotted Flycatchers in the ivy on our old wall.  The parents are very actively zooming around the garden in a distinctive fashion, often returning to the same perch, collecting flies.  They are quite plain little birds with pale fronts and a few freckles . We have had them there before; I found a nestling once that I thought had fallen out - I picked it up with a leaf (so as not to put my smell on it) and returned it to the nest, and watched, and the parent came and threw it out again.  It didn't survive.  Sometimes it's OK to interfere; sometimes not.  Some people say you should never interfere.  Well, I do.  Sometimes.  There was a little moth motionless in the dog's water this morning.  I scooped it out - it was still alive and quickly walked around, drying, and I left it on a leaf outside.  The flycatcher probably got it.

Solomon's Seal sawfly 'caterpillars'

These little grey larvae are on this plant every year, but after the flowering period. I spotted a few and took a picture, and then turned over the leaf which broke as I did so; there were many more on the underside.  I left it like that and in an hour the exposed ones had gone, whether to hide underneath or been eaten by birds I don't know.

A British summer and a Fundi

Oh dear, it has been raining for days.  The garden has exploded with growth and plants are falling over everywhere, what with gale force winds and the water building up on flower heads.  I got soaked walking round the grassy path because the now-tall grasses either side have bowed down with the rain.

  I think I took the picture below last weekend - a few warm and sunny hours which enabled a lawn-mowing.

The plants in front of the wall are all self seeded.  I used to weed everything out; it looked much tidier, but not nearly so pretty.  In the foreground is a bronze fennel (that will have to come out, but I have it other places), then there is white Feverfew and that little orange flower that I call Hawkweed, they look lovely together.  The delphiniums (which I am very proud of, having grown them from seed collected from my sister's garden) are in tubs and are protected from slug damage by copper tape which works very well.  I am certain now, having experimented, that delphiniums will grow unprotected in the open garden if only the basal clumps are big enough when they are first planted out.  So I am growing these bigger, and then they will withstand the early slug attacks and outgrow them.  I already have two plants that are coping in this way.

Two days ago we had a gale force gust of wind which threw our outside table, complete with the garden umbrella, against the wall, breaking two spokes and damaging the fabric cover.  It was new last year so I was very sorry about it.  Anyway Paul took it off to the workshop and removed the spokes which he wood glued and cramped up overnight.  He found some metal channel, perfect size, which he has screwed alongside the breaks to strengthen them. I got the old Singer sewing machine
out and patched the cover, and all is now good again.  We have always tried to 'make do and mend'; it's very satisfying!  A friend of ours who has lived in Africa calls Paul a 'fundi' - someone who can repair anything!

Predators and pretty weeds

I was standing out in the garden just after 7am a couple of days ago when I heard a desperate screeching 'chak';  a jackdaw flying very fast with a buzzard in hot pursuit.  I had never seen a buzzard so low over the garden.  I clapped and shouted - the buzzard wheeled off.  Jackdaw lived to see another day.  I'm sure the screech was a cry for help.  I know they all have to eat - the buzzard probably has young ones to feed.
Today, we have just followed a sparrowhawk down the lane for about a quarter of a mile.  They quite regularly appear suddenly at hedge level or below, flying very fast.  This one was practically skimming the tarmac.  It turned towards a field gate, alighting on it, and having to fly off again as our car passed by.  There are a lot of them; I think they do mostly get sparrows - there are a lot of those here too.

I took the picture of the border (which is MUCH better in real life) - the hardy geraniums, pink and blue, are lovely and will give another show later if I tidy them up after the first flush.  The small white flower clusters are Ground Elder flowers (shock horror) - I will break them off before they seed, but they are pretty and I sometimes let them do this.  And the big green architectural leaves are Hogweed - the plants are so sturdy that they hold up the clumps of weaker perennials.   I cut off the flowering heads so that only the lower strong stalks and leaves are left.  At the far end is a cardoon, a monster that is already 7 feet tall and still growing.  I like it better when it is just a great silver grey clump in April, before it starts to send up the flower spikes.