Gardening
Cumbrian Mist
Now the weather is back to the Cumbrian Cloud Forest climate and the heatwave is a distant nightmare, I set about tackling a Yew hedge that must be at least as old as the house. A previous gardener trained the young tree to be a hedge, like laying a thorn hedge around a field. Subsequent gardeners have let it sprawl, almost to the point of collapse.
Weeding in the Keswick heatwave. Apples on my trees and Latrigg (368 m.) in the background.
I surprised a hedgehog when I was putting the bins out after dusk. It froze next to the house and had shuffled off before I passed again. Great they are around: they keep the slugs and snails down. There’s plenty of potential hedgehog habitat in the wild part of my Keswick garden but it’s rare that I see them. I put some water out as it’s been dry but there seemed to be no takers - there’s been plenty of dew overnight.
We’ve enjoyed a full week of eating out in my garden in Keswick: breakfasts, lunches and dinners. An amazing run of fine weather, though a couple of days have been too hot, even in the Lake District. Payback time for my gardening and junior forestry work thorugh the year.
Read more: Dining out at home in Keswick - Lake District National Park
A rather scruffy bee in my garden in Keswick. The Lake District is about insects too! Really quite weird and wonderful to find myself eyeballing such a strange creature, usually they are darting about so much that you never see the detail. This one was moving with difficulty so is an old bee, think of an octogenarian in human terms. A bumblebee queen lives for up to a year, workers and males for far less. It would be great to think that this queen has fulfilled her biological instinct and established a colony in my garden.
