Monday, June 22, 2009

Summer in full swing..




Hi everyone,
Growth is in full swing here at River Cottage, and we are kept busy weeding and watering the vegetables and ornamental plants.
Yet again, the raised vegetable beds are proving very succesful, and crops are showing good, steady growth with no signs of disease or pest attack.
We continue to use Bio Fleece, a woven nylon mesh that was designed to stop carrot fly, which we have used exclusively for the past few years now with great success.
We find it stops onion fly, mealy bugs, and many other pests and diseases, simply because they can't get at them.
Of course, for flowering crops, you need to uncover them when they reach that stage of growth so they can be pollinated by insects and set crops.
At present we are enjoying losts of leafy salads - three varieties of organic lettuce that are beautifully fresh and crisp.
Broad beans are flowering profusely and there is a constant buzz as bees visit their quite wonderful flowers in purple and lilac shades.
Radishes are almost too prolific to keep up with, but need to be eaten before they get too big and turn woody. They have a great peppery tang and are crunchy and juicy at present.
We are growing a cylindrical, Italian beetroot this season and it seems to like our organic growing methods.
Eileen is continuing to paint, when she can make time, and Mark is busy with his writing. Summer is in full swing and the birds and bees know it.
Of course, the longest day of the year was yesterday.
Wednesday, Mark is reading his poetry at the local library - It is St. John's night which is traditionally celebrated here with bonfires.
Have a great week. I'm off to to have an egg salad for lunch.

Sunday, June 21, 2009

A bird like an insect...

Returning home from a Poetry reading in Ballina late the other evening I pulled over for a break and opened the car window. And there they were. Singing beautifully in the dark stillness - Grasshopper Warblers. The air was full of their cricket-like mantra - a bird that sounds like an insect. Their song lends a distinctly mainland European flavour to the Irish countryside; like Greece or Spain, perhaps.
The Grasshopper Warbler is widely distributed but seldom seen. We used to hear them in certain areas of Macclesfield, the town where we lived in Cheshire, England. But I rarely caught a glimpse. More often than not they were skulking deep among bramble and Rosebay Willowherb on railway embankments; skulking is their habit.
They favour anywhere wild and unmanaged; low scrub and overgrown grass. In fact, they have an elongated middle-toe for that is ideal for grasping several grass stems or such like; the Reed Warbler and Sedge Warbler are different, having a foot evolved for grasping individual reed stems.
Their reeling song is unique. And when singing they turn their heads from side to side producing a ventroloquist effect, so that the sound rises and falls, comes and goes, sounds here then there, making it a joy to listen to, but very difficult to pinpoint.
They don't tend to sing on bright nights so you won't hear one singing when the moon is full. Their preference is for dark, still nights when they can sing undercover to their heart's content, to use a cliché. Last evening, here at River Cottage, was one such evening, and the night air was full of them.
If you do catch a glimpse of the bird you may be disappointed - apart from the thrill of having actually seen one - by its appearance. They are quite a nondescript small brown bird, and you may find yourself wondering what all the fuss is about. But that elusive bird always causes my heart to leap - as though I have set eyes on a Secret of Nature. Make no mistake - the Grasshopper Warbler is special. And I'm glad to say their distribution is increasing.

Best Wishes, Mark

Sunday, June 14, 2009

Willow warblers, Wild flowers & Painted Ladies


In the calm of this evening, the sweet song of a willow warbler drifts through mys study window from the top of an alder tree thirty yards away. Ah! He has raised his first brood and is establishing his territorial rights for his second brood. That is great! For a few days now the garden has been full of young willow warblers, easily identifiable by their light eye-stripe. If we have a good Summer the birds might manage three broods. I hope so.
One sign that the ecosystem is healthy here is our resident sparrow-hawk. We see him now and again, and I have written poetry about him. I once saw him take a resting swallow straight off the telephone wire. But, more usually, he picks off a siskin or a coal tit - here is the poem. I call it 'Sparrowhawk'. I read it publicly only last weekend at The Force 12 Writers Festival at Belmullet, here in Co. Mayo:

Sparrowhawk

He'll be along shortly
hugging the river's bouldery course
then a twist and lift will bring him
gliding silently over the gate
to arc round the willow tree
where peanuts hang invitingly
for greenfinch, blue tit, coal tit -
his intended prey!
Even though when they
see his silhouette
they seek to resist their fate
it's almost too late by then -
a slow-motion death-dance follows
as they dash out all instinct and panic:
A mistake!
This is his moment.
This is how he
earns his daily bread, his survival.
He presses his honed advantage,
an almost casual talon-snatch
seeing him carry away his kill
for a frenzied feed in his plucking tree.

So it goes from week to week -
one can't help but admire his technique,
perfected over a hundred Millennia.
He captures perhaps one in three:
To watch him kill, is poetry.

(c) Mark F Chaddock 2009

With the warm bright weather the vegetable growth has picked up - it needed to. Even with the fleece we have permanently covering the raised beds the vegetables were behind for this time of the season.
The wild flowers by the river have been commanding our attention. We are lucky to have the beautiful wild flag iris; the early purple orchid; ragged robin; flowering plaintain; ox-eye daisies; rhododendron ponticum; buttercups; dandelions; birdsfoot trefoil and many more. We are like children again - I spend time trying to capture their beauty with the camera; their relationship with sunlight.
We were beautifully swarmed by migrating Painted Lady butterflies on 31st May. They were racing everywhere in pairs in their tens of thousands - I do not exaggerate - and then after two days they were more or less gone again when the wind changed direction carrying them south towards mainland Europe. But they must have left behind a legacy of eggs from their flight of passion. And later in the season the island will be overrun for the second time by Painted Ladies. What a wonderful promise! Eileen spotted the bright green clustered eggs on a Torbay palmtoday; I'm not sure what the caterpillar foodplant is, but I doubt it was Achill's palms that attracted them here.
Have a lovely week :) Mark