Heatwave

One pond has gone brown, one has gone green. Magical.

Miwwions of tiny frogs though, so that's good.

Worms are dead, it's just too hot and I can't look after them properly as work has been manic. Things should calm down soon, sort of, so hope to get the wormeries working properly at some point!

Greenguage tree didn't blossom, but the apple tree has little apples on it.

The front garden is a riot of greenery and looks wonderful to my eyes, although my neighbour complains (in a friendly way) that it's just overgrown. The back garden is suffering the heatwave and the grass is dying, but the plants are surviving. The honeysuckle that the fence people cut down is coming back up.

What's Going on in the Garden

I finally got round to restocking the ponds with plants today - it had been three months and the water went all green again! So the plants will hopefully clear some of that up. With the rain we've had the green has been much diluted!

Lots of tadpoles in the ponds, they were very late, but I had some in both ponds, which I've never had before!

The wormeries are doing so-so. It's possible I'm not feeding them enough. At least one of them had lots of young skinny worms in it! They were on the lid, I didn't notice with the other one. What else is cute is that I feed my dogs on a raw meaty bones diet, and so they tend to poop out small bits of bone. There are lots of very clean bits of bone in the wormeries!

The apple tree has lots of blosson on it, but the greenguage tree, not a petal so far.

Fresh Pond Water

I unfortunately had a fair bit of sickness and the runs in the dogs last year, so I drained the ponds and refilled them.

We've had a really cold winter and the vet who home checked me for dog boarding told me that if there was anything in the water the cold would have killed it but I want to be sure!

There were quite a few frogs hibernating, so I hope they won't have suffered for the 24 hours it took to refill the ponds!

Just have to wait and see if we get frogspawn this year.

Honey bees?

I think I might be lucky enough to be hosting a honey bee nest. I lifted the lid off the compost bin to empty the hoover and about six bees came flying out! I was Very Scared and threw the lid on and ran away. I've popped back out, which is how I got the photo, and I'm pretty sure they are honey bees. I rang some local beekeepers and they are talking amongst themselves about hopefully coming out to double check that is what I've got (and ideally if there is any chance they can adopt them).

If they are bees they should be safe to pass in and out of the house, obviously I don't want to disturb them, but I fear Jacob might be a bit unhappy about it. Really, I'm not too happy with the positioning myself, could be a bit farther away from the entrances to the house - I won't be able to open my kitchen window while they are there. But to have a bees nest, I haven't seen one of those in the garden since I had some bumble bees, so I'm very excited!