July has slipped into August, and that odd feeling of racing against the horticultural clock is creeping in. First light is now relatively quiet, with the territorial showdowns of the dawn chorus over, and the evenings are no longer punctuated by the Valkyrie screams of the swifts cutting their gravity defying manoeuvres overhead. There are feathered adolescents of all sorts bumbling around: our ravens appear to be guiding a youngster in the ways of aerial domination, the wrens chide me furiously every day if I unwittingly approach their not-quite airborn offspring, and a fluffy thrush had to be rescued from the conservatory the other day. Then there is the young buzzard, who from daybreak to dusk calls and cries and protests his new-found (or presumably imposed) independence. His mum has clearly told him the meal tickets have run out and it is time to seek his own way, but he is having none of it, and circles the wood miserably, whinging and moaning, protesting this enforced despatch to adulthood. Adult birds mate for life, and may have two to three eggs per brood, with youngsters continuing to be fed for a couple of weeks after flight. Left in peace, a pair will make a patch of woodland their home, raising generation after generation of offspring. Our parents glide between our wood and our neighbour’s, and while we have not yet found the nest site, we witnessed the same teenage strops from last year’s young. Buzzards are one of British wildlife’s success stories: like the peregrine and other raptors, they were decimated by pesticide use and persecution, and by the 1970’s were a rarity. I remember childhood trips to Wales, when the suspected sighting of a buzzard was sufficient cause for emergency braking and ardent scanning of treetops with binoculars. Now they appear more common than kestrels. Known as the ‘tourist eagle’ in Scotland for their passing resemblance to the much larger real thing, they never attain the steely glamour of the peregrine or the aerial bravado of the red kite, but I am immensely fond of these brown and cream stalwarts of our wood and hope they raise many more broods here.
Back down to earth and we are making progress steadily with the new beds, much helped by regular rain. Neil’s raised beds are filling rapidly with greenery: the squash are rampaging over the edges, while in the brassicas’ beds, the nets are not quite enough to outwit the cabbage white butterflies. Infiltration has occurred, as I realised when I peered under one of the nets and found five caterpillars tucking into a young cabbage, and tiny yellow eggs on some of the other plants. I did remove them, with a moment of ecological guilt, which evaporated as another eight butterflies swirled around me as I exited the netting. A couple of caterpillars will devour an entire row of plants - not for nothing was our boys’ favourite childhood book titled “The Very Hungry Caterpillar”. I am intrigued by how our vegetables appeal to our local wildlife: the brassicas are a predictable target for the cabbage whites, but more surprising was two rows of cavolo nero seedlings being shredded by voles (we presume voles - unless our rabbits are Olympian athletes capable of leaping up into our raised beds) shortly after planting. Similarly, the pigeons are obsessed with our cosmos seedlings, overlooking young sweet corn plants, pea seedlings and other delicacies. Rodents, birds and caterpillars all pointedly ignore row upon row of lettuces. Happily our hedgehog(s?) are still busy, and the toad population is healthy, so our slug and snail count remains close to zero.
The big new beds around the terrace keep me busy all the time, but this week I did forcibly remove myself to a different part of the garden in order to keep the redevelopment momentum going. Our elder son has finished clearing out the wood shed, a grim job as the accretions of decaying wood, old sacks of iron-set concrete mix and enormous spiders were revealed underneath the logs, and this clearance means we can progress plans for that to become the potting shed. It is an attractive building, flanked on two sides by beds and home to a mature hydrangea petiolaris.
The east-facing wall to its right gets plenty of sun, and is now home to a crab apple, two lemon verbena shrubs and two climbing roses, plus white echinacea and my salvaged eryngiums. To the left of the shed door, there are now a couple of roses, some white currant bushes, another crab apple and more hydrangeas to complement the viburnum plicatum. It is a dry bed, and our sandy Herefordshire clay caps off badly when it is hot, so this will require much mulching in the autumn to prevent rain rolling straight off it and into the shed. In every new bed where soil has been imported I find tiny feathery seedlings erupting, which turn out to be chamomile. The sheer quantity suggests the compost must have been made from an entire chamomile lawn, and while there is no place for the greenish white and yellow daisy flowers in the hot bed, I am happy for them to colonise the thin border at base of the wall and other spots further out.
Elsewhere, more fruit on the move. I got bored waiting for their dormancy given that my “autumn fruiting” raspberries upped and fruited in June, so they are now settling into their new home near the walnut trees. As they fill out they will form an L-shaped frame to the first apple espalier, while the other espalier has a shorter “L” and contains a couple of red currant bushes. We have not yet decided which apples to plant along this avenue; training fruit trees will be a steep learning curve for us, and the trees themselves will not go in until late autumn/winter, so we have time still for research. The farthest end of the potager has been neglected of late, but a round of strimming by our our younger son has made it look presentable, and given how sheltered it is, may yet provide a home for my young quince tree.
I had originally cherished visions of this prettiest of fruit trees sitting above the demi-lune beds, but more time spent here makes it clear that our blasting winds would probably reduce it to confetti in a month, so a different location and a focal point past the mower store it will be.
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