It's been a pretty crazy busy autumn, so this is a bit of late catch up.
The hedgehogs stopped coming to the garden around late October and I think the foxes have been annoyed I've stopped putting food out - as they keep tossing the peanut feeder about! I feel I've not seen as many foxes around in daytime this autumn. I've found a small cache of hazelnut shells which I'm pretty sure belong to one (ha! like there's ever *one*) of the wood mice.
As November was such a mild month, plants kept flowering past their usual times. The forsythia clearly thought we'd had winter and burst forth along the back wall in a gaudy yellow flourish. The orange blossoms (Choisya grandiflora) followed suit, filling the air with perfumed scent.
My cactus dahlias suddenly (and very briefly) flowered.
I expanded the 'burial plots' in the front garden - this is in an attempt to eradicate the front lawn, which, biodiversity-wise, is pretty poor. The technique I'm loosly following involves covering sections of the lawn with well watered cardboard, covered with a layer of soil (and then sprinkled with wild flower seeds). Obviously doing this in November I did not expect any of the seeds to really take this year - but they have proved me wrong! A fair amount of tiny fragile seedlings have sprouted, and, more suprisingly, survived the snow and -8C temperatures that we had at the start of December! There's currently a couple of red campions (Silene diocia) flowering away - nature nevers ceases to amaze!
The firethorn (Pyracantha) 'hedge' had a wonderful crop of berries for its first year, all the plants seem to have taken (although some need re-direction). Unfortunately it is still not enough of a barrier to the postie (who continues to walk straight across the garden), but fingers crossed in a few years it will.
The nature hedge is starting to get taller than the existing box hedge, so is sustaining some wind damage, but will get a good prune in the spring to encourage more horizontal growth anyway. Some animal (?) has had a good chew of one of the sloe stems - genuinely can't think what would have done this (unless it was a vindictive mouse or some-sort of rogue rabbit loose in the area).
The snow in December brought birds back to the garden in great numbers - of particularly blackbirds and tits. I finally managed to photograph the camera-shy long-tailed tits as they flurried from garden to garden. On the morning after the first snowfall, we had a most unusual visitor to the garden: a grey wagtail accompanied by a pied wagtail. I have never before seen a grey wagtail away from water, so I can only assume it got lost somewhere. Although the grey has left, the pied has remained and shows no sign of going away - it seems to love the bird seed.
The squirrel populations were also very busy in the autumn, running repeated nut relay races. I think the maximum I saw at one time was 5 - and although most were keeping their distance from each other, there were several spats. Squirrels seem to have this incredible ability to just jump straight up in the air when startled and often when one jumps it sets the other ones off! In later November/ early December there were some more amorous males about - the females lead the males on an often long game of chase (presumably the test the endurance of future genetics). Half-tail has some competition this year, with at least two other males for the females to choose from. Fortunately he seems to have made it through this year with no further loss of limbs/appendages so perhaps he's mellowing somewhat.
In order to sustainably feed the squirrel hordes, I decided to join a Crowdfarming scheme. These are mainly fruit or veg based, but I found a couple where you can sponsor a walnut tree, in exchange for produce. So in December (after a wrangle with Parcelforce - don't get me started) 5kg of walnuts in shell arrived. If I'm honest, I thought 5kg would be much bigger! I'm trying to ration them out; whilst supplimenting with discount festive nuts from the supermarket.
*Note: if anyone else feeds squirrels with the festive nuts (in shell) from the supermarket - please take out all the Brazil nuts - as too much selenium can make them intoxicated - which sounds fun, but can be fatal!
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