Things that happen in the night

-

 



I have seen one at last. I heard about people doing this in lockdown, but I had not seen one in our area. Now I have! For some reason people have been knitting tops for royal mail post boxes. The big round boxes, I mean, that stand freely on the footpaths in our streets. The rectangular boxes would not be as easy to fit. But the one I have seen fits as snugly as a beret.

After reading about it in the Star, I saw mine in Ellesmere in the north of the county, but I imagine that there are others. I took a photo, astounded by the skill of the knitters who had made a figure and a horse with great detail and ingenuity. I wonder if it appeared overnight in the secret of darkness like our famous Banksy. No one was taking any notice of it as they passed by on their way to the shops – perhaps they had seen it before, but I hadn’t, and I was filled with excitement and wonder.

Where did all this start? I know that in lockdown knitting became more popular and perhaps the top of a post box was just waiting for a hat!

Something appeared on our basil plants seemingly overnight too. And at first it was not so exciting. Something is eating our basil plants. I first ordered a plant online from my supermarket. It was delivered with the rest of my groceries fresh and ready to garnish our tomato dishes. It was on the kitchen table for us to help ourselves until it began to wither. Mr T took it out and, dividing it into three, he planted them in the greenhouse. We have had basil all through the summer but now something is getting to it, there are big holes in the leaves.

The culprit is a big green caterpillar which, on investigation, turns out to be the larva of the yellow underwing moth. It is now in a special container with food, in our utility room on a shelf. We can watch it through glass sides to check that all is well, and our basil leaves are not being attacked now. It is getting fatter and keeps on burrowing in the soil we have given it. It will stay there until the spring when it changes into a chrysalis. Then next summer we will let the adult out when it emerges. We have given it a name – Basil – no surprise there.

But our squashes are a surprise. They have been spurred on by the recent rain, then the milder temperatures and they have swollen rapidly. The spaghetti marrow is my favourite.





 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The dangers of living in the country

-
I know that you might think that living in the country we do not get to see people very much. And it is true that I cannot walk out of my door and have a natter with a next door neighbour and I can’t just pop in to a cafe and catch up with friends who happen to be there. But you would be surprised how often I do meet up with friends – it’s just that you have to make more of an effort and it all has to be arranged and planned and when we do meet – we never stop taking – you see there is so much to say after only having our pets for company. Well, anyway, I am trying to tell you about what happened last night. Now the nights are drawing in we all agreed to meet up for an evening meal in our nearest town to cheer ourselves up. I offered to pick up a friend in a nearby village and drive to the nearest town miles away. What a good time we had catching up on news and ... well, just talking to a person and not a cat or bees or the like. But at the end of the evening I was dismayed to find tha
Read more

Flying through the air in summer

-
Image
Here come the butterflies searching for flowers rich in nectar This is the Peacock with the Holly Blue butterfly They are back! Now the buddleias are in flower the butterflies are here to drink their nectar. I especially love seeing the beautiful red ones. There are whites too, of course, they have been here for some time. We don’t like the whites as much, because they lay eggs on our cabbage plants and, when their larvae hatch, they eat the leaves. But there is another ‘white’ butterfly that has just appeared. It is not quite white, in fact, this is the male and is very yellowy, the yellow of butter. I wonder if this where ‘butter-flies’ got their name. The female is harder to spot as she is a cream colour. I like them in the garden because they do not eat our cabbages, their caterpillars eat buckthorn leaves. Once you have seen them with their big yellow wings flopping around you will never mistake them for cabbage whites. There is something else flopping around our garden, but
Read more

A sign of the times

-
Image
  ‘You are number fifteen in the queue’. The automated voice tells me as I wait patiently trying to speak to a doctor’s receptionist. Then there was the morning when I thought I would order my medicines online. ‘We do not recognise your ID and Password’ I usually remember all my passwords, so I tried again to no avail. I could not get in to make an order. I would have to take my request to the surgery. How reliant I am on technology and when there was an outage, we were all lost. I drive everywhere with the Sat Nav and would have to learn map reading again without it. Of course, I simply waited and this week we are back to normal and some of my friends who have never trusted technology think they have proved their point. But things have changed and there is no going back. I wish the moles on our lawn would go back underground though. They are active on our grass at the moment and it seems that every morning when I look out of the widow there are more and more brown mounds in ev
Read more