We woke up this morning to yet more snow, as in most of Britain.
The birds were flocking to the feeders – which now need replenishing. Today the woodpecker stayed long enough for me to take some photos.
The tits are bolder and come up onto the decking outside the kitchen.
This one landed in the snow and nearly sank.
Lucy, who hasn’t ventured outside since the snow first came at the end of November, sits and watches the birds as they come near the window.
This is what she wished she could catch
I love gardens but I’m not a good gardener and I’ve always thought that I can grow weeds much better than any other plants. I read somewhere that weeds are just plants growing in the wrong place. My experience is that they are extremely hardy, grow exceptionally well and need little if any help from me – leave them to themselves and they’ll quickly fill any spaces and more on any type of soil.
I have spent hours, days, years even trying to get rid of bindweed and ground elder. No matter what I’ve tried – digging them out, which seems impossible, smothering them or dousing them with chemicals, which worked for a while,- they always comes back and kill anything growing in the way. The only benefit I can see is that the flowers are quite pretty.
So, when I was sitting in the café in a bookshop the other week and I saw Weeds by Richard Mabey on display opposite where I was sitting I just had to have a look at it:
I haven’t read it yet, but I’ve dipped into it. Here is an extract that caught my eye as I browsed the pages:
Weeds thrive in the company of humans. They aren’t parasites, because they can exist without us, but we are their natural ecological partners, the species alongside which they do best. They relish the things we do to the soil; clearing forests, digging, farming, dumping nutrient-rich rubbish. They flourish in arable fields, battlefields, parking lots, herbaceous borders. They exploit our transport systems, our cooking adventures, our obsession with packaging. Above all they use us when we stir the world up, disrupt its settled patterns. It would be a tautology to say that these days they are found most abundantly where there is most weeding; but that notion ought to make us question whether the weeding encourages the weeds as much as vice versa. (page 12)
Is he saying we’d do just as well not doing any weeding?
Teaser Tuesday is a weekly event hosted by MizB where you share ‘teasers’. I’ve adapted it a bit in this post, to include more information about the book and longer teasers.
The snow is still here, we’re getting a bit fed up with it, but it does make a pretty picture. Everything looks as though it’s covered in royal icing.
The field across the road is sparkling in the sun this morning – click on photo to see the sparkles:
D has been feeding the birds every day, topping up the feeders. We had lots of visitors, including robins, bluetits, great tits, greenfinches, goldfinches chaffinches, sparrows, wood pigeons and a woodpecker too.
We can identify most of the birds but this one has us puzzled. What is it?
It appeared on the decking where D had put a tray of birdseed and ventured very close to the patio doors. I tried several times to get a good photo and this is the best I could do.
Here it is enlarged:
We’ve checked in the RSPB Charts and our bird books – A Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe, the Reader’s Digest Field Guide to the Birds of Britain, and Collins Bird Guide, but I’m not sure if I can identify it. Is it a meadow pipit?
Just look at that stare?
It’s a little bit warmer today, the icicles hanging from the gutters are melting, and the sky is blue. This is the view of the back garden where the sun is shining.
The front garden all is in shade. The birds disappeared when I opened the door to take this photo, but the feeders are tremendously popular.
I had to crawl to the window in the front room to take this photo of a lesser spotted woodpecker on the bird feeder as the slightest movement and it flew away.
It’s difficult to see the woodpecker’s beautiful plumage because the tree is in the shade and the woodpecker refused to move round so I could take a photo of it’s lovely colours.
These are photos of the shadows in our garden yesterday, showing the glorious autumn colours.
For more Shadow Shots go to Hey Harriet’s blog.
A few ‘new’ books came into our house this week.
click to enlarge
Some came from Barter Books in Alnwick. For a while now I’ve been trying to make some space on the bookshelves. I find it very hard to let any books go, but as I have a large number of unread books I decided to be ruthless and think about the books I have read and whether I would I ever read them again. I managed to weed out 25 books and on Tuesday we took them to Barter Books, one of the largest secondhand bookshops in Britain. It is housed in a huge old railway station, built in 1887 and closed to passengers in 1968. Now it’s a bookshop that works on a swap system – you take books in and if they accept them you receive a credit and can then use that to get more books. You can, of course, just go and buy books as well. They accepted 22 of our books and I came away with just 6, so I have achieved a small amount of shelf space.
The books I ‘bought’ were three Ian Rankin Inspector Rebus books to complete our set (I have read these already), and an early novel of his, Watchman, which I haven’t read. The other two books were gardening books:
Both these books were my husband’s choice. They are full of practical things to do and make such as making a bird table, building a cascade, making a compost bin, laying paving stones and decking etc.
And he found this book on Amazon, The Stream Garden by Archie Skinner and David Arscott, all about creating and planting your own natural-looking water feature. The reason behind his choice is that we want to improve the little stream that runs through our garden. I posted a video of its current condition on my other blog Margaret’s Miscellany last Sunday. I’d love our stream to look something like this:
Books to read next:
I finished a couple of books this week – The Rain Before It Falls by Jonathan Coe, which I wrote about earlier and Salmon Fishing in the Yemen by Paul Torday, which I’ll write about soon. Reading Coe’s book reminded me of Mary Webb’s Gone To Earth, so I got that down off the shelf and I’m thinking of reading it this week. I read it several times as a young teenager and loved it. I’m curious to find out what I think of it now.
I had to move all my to-be-read books out of the living room this week because we’re having a wood-burning stove installed and I didn’t want the books to get covered in brick dust etc. This got me looking at what I have in waiting, as it were, and I think I’ll choose one of these books to read next:
We have an old plum tree in our garden. This year is the first year we’ve been here and we didn’t know what to expect from the tree. It’s been absolutely blooming, full of fruit. The boughs are weighed down to the ground with the weight and I’ve picked many kilos of plums. I don’t have any jam jars so I’ve been cooking the plums and either eating them with ice cream, or making crumble, or freezing the fruit.
I made crumble with some of these, a simple recipe made with plain flour, sugar and butter, rubbed in until mixture resembles breadcrumbs and then cooked on top of the plums for about 30 -40 minutes at 190°C.
Check out the other entries this week at Weekend Cooking.
Yesterday it was my birthday and as well as books D gave me a new camera. I’ve been trying it out today: here are a few photos I took in our garden and
Back garden
Lucy
Back garden from the decking
of the front garden
Front garden
and the field across the road where the rapeseed was being cut this afternoon.
Cutting rapeseed
(Click on the photos to enlarge.)
*The title of this post is taken from the song “And the Mouse Police Never Sleeps” from Jethro Tull’s album “Heavy Horses“.
