Beautiful but slightly eerie mist greeted my arrival at work this morning.
I normally have a handful of chores to carry out on arrival but this morning the first thing I did was to grab my camera. The reflections in the pond were screaming out for attention.
Last year, after I had finished building the compost bins I used the leftover scrap wood (and some old roofing tiles) to make five nestboxes; four for tits and one for robins/flycatchers. Only two of the former were used and due to rubbish siting, the latter was sneered at by the resident robin population. I did though put them up fairly late (about February) so I am hoping for a better take up rate this year. I’ve moved the robin box to a very up and coming area (trendy, lots going on), so they should be queuing around the block this year.
During last summer, whilst a pair of blue tits were raising a second brood, a grey squirrel gnawed into the box and ate the young. Nasty, foulbreathed, twitchy-nosed miscreant. I have heard similar stories before but never experienced it. A few year’s ago my Dad-in-Law, took great delight in watching a clutch of wrens being raised in a nest box on his garden shed. That is, until a magpie raided it and ate all the babies. So today, having made a new (fifth) tit box, I fitted them all with steel plates that guard against squirrels, magpies etc enlarging the hole and chowing down on the young.
They’re a little rough and ready, or as I prefer to call them – Rustic Chic.
By the time I’d finished faffing about with the boxes, fixed a broken fingernail and reapplied my lippy, the sun had burnt away the mist and it was a perfect spring (only in February) morning.
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| The west pond. You can make out the greenhouse through the trees |
I finished off hacking back and tying in the large climbing roses (abandoned in a bloody huff a few days ago) on the rose tunnel and it was pretty much time to pack up for the day.
Really chuffed that the crocuses I planted in autumn 2008 are flowering and increasing in number. This is just one variety (Firefly) planted on this slope. There are another four – all with slightly differing flowering times. Last autumn I planted a further seven varieties in various other parts of the garden.
