Another soggy month. The grass is diminishing in the back garden [think I only properly cut it once this year] being replaced by moss...and mushrooms. The clover is flourishing where the grass can't cope, so there is a proper mosaic of species currently.
The plants continue to be confused by the weather. I've got sunflowers out! And cosmos, salvias, cistus, ragwort, red clover, hebe, mallows, honeysuckle...spring bulbs are already showing green shoots and our lovely big hydrangea has turned a gorgeous dusky pink colour [except for one floret which is dutifully a regular barbie pink].
It has rained so much that one night the water level in the barrel pond was raised enough to allow the pingpong ball to float out...The floating pond fountain has also suffered somewhat. One morning I found it upside-down on the lawn. On closer inspection, the nozzle where the water comes out had been chewed [?] so now the water spurts out erratically. I wrongly assumed one of the gulls was responsible, but after watching a young magpie tweaking leaves out of the pond, I suspect the latter is the more likely subject. I later witnessed a magpie also succeed in getting inside dwarf bean cage, and digging up a peanut - thus proving the cage is also redundant in keeping out squirrels....
Talking of squirrels, I'm clearly over-feeding them. What with all their frivolous activity [see below]
combined with too much food, they are getting too heavy for the fence. Even before the "frenzy" that was Storm Babet, the additional squirrel weight was starting to bend the fragile nature of the willow fence. To be fair, it's probably not entirely the squirrels fault. The fence sat in our garage for 6 months before erecting it and this combined with the prevailing wind direction and lack of any tall vertical post to firmly attach it to will all have contributed to its downfall. Unfortunately as a result of storm damage [where the wind gusted in all directions], all of the vertical struts on one side snapped. Annoyingly it was irrepairable, so I just cut the broken part away. The holly bush from next door is a good fence filler for now.
In hedgehog news the hogs continue to ignore/shun actual hedgehog kibble [although clearly the slugs like it, below left].
We had a visitor a few nights ago to the peanut feeder...there was a large orange slug in the way and so the hog proceeded to use it as a step stool to get into the nuts....
Even on nights where we don't see hogs themselves, there is evidence of them in the garden the following day. The photo below is of regular hedgehog scat [with hazelnut for scale].
I say 'regular' because it contains insect/beetle shell casings and fruit seeds/pips which form much of their natural diet. However, as I know for a fact that many of my neighbours also feed the local wildlife; and typically this is either kibble, tinned food, peanuts, raw eggs etc. Often there is scat which is a much looser, softer quality with no discernable items visable, which suggests that the non-natural food is forming a large proportion of their diet. I don't know how much scat the average hedgehog produces, so perhaps this is just a coincidence of several hogs who over-indulged one night.
I made a random discovery in the front garden this morning: a half buried, half eated chicken egg...I'm looking at you fox....
Fascinating fact: some squirrels love avocado! Bizarely both the skin and the pit are poisonous, but the flesh is perfectly fine. They were less keen on the overgrown baby sweetcorn, although I think the mice liked it.
Winter is coming, so grey/silver fur is back into fashion
I think there must be some territory arguements going on at the moment, lots of frantic tail displays from prominent points and chasing each other:
We haven't got round to any pumpkin carving related antics this year...but this was a video from two years ago [ignore the video date stamp] ...bonus points if you know what the character I carved is from :)
However, some very shady characters have been sighted in the garden [in addition to the usual suspects]...is that a muppet??!
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