Spring is nearly here!

[pollygog]

Finally here is the picture of the hedgehog that fell into my wildlife pond. He'd started to warm up by this stage due to the very hot day and to curl up but by then he had had most of the weed pulled off him. One very lucky hedgehog to find him early morning when I did unlike his little mate a few weeks later.

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[pollygog]

Sequel to the hedgehogs falling into wildlife pond is I fished a dead bank vole floating in my koi pond this morning, its been a bad time for wildlife accidents lately as this week we have had a young robin fly into conservatory window and kill itself and a tiny goldcrest fly into same window and survived just dazed last week. Luckily I heard it and went outside just as our new dog Lottie was about to grab it, she would very definitely have killed it as she had caught a young blackbird in our hedge a few weeks ago and killed it before I could get to her that time.
Nice colourful visiter to my wildlife pond last Monday morning was a stunning black and yellow banded dragonfly a good three inches long resting on a waterlilly leaf in the sunshine, just beautiful but, as soon as you dive off for your camera!.
Finally got around to starting setting up my quarantine tank this week and totally amazed at the accumulated bits and pieces of pond filter equipment I've found hidden away in boxes I'd forgotten I had. I found three uv units, four if you count the tiny 5 watt one in the lid of a lotus filter I also found skyed away in my shed. I've sent off for a couple of TMC 25 watt uv tubes and the strange anomaly is they are dearer than the 55 watt TMC tubes I use in my koi pond filter. Will update my progress on this project as I proceed.

[pollygog]

Very disturbing news via phone call this week, a friend of mine dosed his koi pond with PP for the first time this Monday and mis-read the instructions I sent him and has managed to kill all but one of his koi, 5 out of 6 and he has not got much hope for the survivor. He is 78 and not in good health so its worrying to say the least, he has had the fish that I got for him from Ken Waterhouse since 2005, obviously you do get attached to them after so long. The instructions should have been 7 grammes or one level teaspoon per 1,000 gallons and he either mis-read the small print as 100 gallons or got mixed up between litres and gallons, the bottom line was he put 4 full teaspoons into a 1,350 litre pond. Of course he rang me after the event not before to check!.
Identified the dragonfly visitor to my wildlife pond it was a Golden Ringed dragonfly they are 74mm to 84mm long or 3" in old money, they are big and beautiful.
The uv tubes for my quarantine tank cost me £16.98 for two P&P inclusive from Aquatics4U so not too bad in the end as they charge me £12.95 for a 55watt bulb P&P inc, the quarantine tank is up and running now and cleared of green water within 48 hrs of putting new uv bulb in, isn't it bloody marvelous what technology brings to us mere mortals.
I have some more photo's to post of hedgehog visiters to our garden including a possible drunk one as we found her in daylight curled up in dried grass under an apple tree after eating fermenting windfalls. We put her in a box in summer house for the day with a good feed of dog food and released her after dark that night, must have been ok as she triggered security light the next night, possibly back for a 'hair of the dog' also a baby hedgehog possibly one of her babies that managed to tangle itself in the netting around my blackberries.
Koi Club meeting last night and as a raffle prize I took a box of home grown Victoria plums, I also took a bag of same plums for a fellow member no names no pack drill but I had promised him some plums when they were ripe as I know how he loves them. First ticket out and obvious prize chosen was a beautiful Kujaku very kindly donated and put forward by Colin, second raffle ticket anounced, and of all the raffle prizes on offer the owner of the bag of plums chose, the box of plums!

[pollygog]

Baby hedgehog visitor to blackberry patch is it cute or what!

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[roselanekoi]

Sorry to hear about your friends mishap with the PP, he's in good company. The famous american koi expert Erik L. Johnson once made a similar mistake and wiped out his own koi collection.

If you are using PP it's strongly advisable to have some hydrogen peroxide on hand as this will quickly neutralise the PP if your koi are showing sign of distress.

With regards to the Kujaku raffle prize at last nights club meeting, whilst I can claim credit for selecting the koi at Richdon Koi, I can't claim credit for donating the koi as it was paid for by the club.

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The raffle winner chose the koi on the left.

Colin

[pollygog]

My mistake and cheers for that Colin I promise to pay more attention at club meetings from now on, but still two nice fish and the one on the left is my choice.My friend Alan had bought Hydrogen Peroxide with PP as I instructed but he left it for 4 hours before dosing as he didn't know at that stage he had overdosed until his koi went belly up, hence the phone call to me. He hasn't been put off by the shocking experience though and is already looking for some small cheap (or free) pond fillers to re-stock his pond with. One good thing has come out of it and that is he promised that he will check with me before carrying out any further treatment to his pond. What surprised me is he normally does check with me before any treatment as he is a very cautious belt and braces man.
One thing I forgot to mention is the very generous amount of free veg that Sue and Keith distributed at the koi club meeting this Wednesday night ,they brought along a large whicker basket full of rhubarb,courgettes,two varieties of tomato, cucumbers etc and all excellent quality, a big thank you from all present on Wednesday night you are thoughtful kind people, bless you.

[pollygog]

Must be the result or should that be a consequence of the hot summer we have enjoyed so far, but the enormous invasion of wasps about are really a nuisance this year in attacking my fruit.
Apples, pears, blackberries, plums, nothing is safe to the extent that I have never ever netted so much fruit before, I found a good dozen or so a few days ago in a plum they'd hollowed out that my dog Hamish was about to eat, luckily I managed to stop him grabbing it as he just loves them stones and all. Unfortunately for the wasps my rudd love them so they got a treat when I put the plum with the wasps in into my pond in a net, the wasps shot to the surface and vanished in seconds!.
I even bought more new insect proof netting a couple of weeks ago to cover my blackberries for the first time because of constant daily wasp attacks.
I suppose on the credit side is we have also had an enormous amount of hover flies about this year as there have been hundreds of them attracted to the yellow flowers of the herb Bronze Fennel in our back garden. the hover flies absolutely love it and the big bonus of hover flies attracted to your garden is hover flies eat aphids(as do wasps). When you walk past the Fennel the air is alive with the hum of insects on it, just like the Buddlia we have is to butterflies and a lot of those about too thanks to this summers heatwave.
I found the best way to observe them was to put a stepladder up on the path through the Buddlia and stand on the top of the stepladder, best I've seen this year (in July), two Painted Ladies,two Peacocks and a newly emerged imaculate Red Admiral all feeding on the one Buddlia florette, just stunning in the bright sunshine, theres been lots of Tortoiseshells about this year and the dreaded Cabbage Whites too.
Despite the wasps, this year I have grown the best plums for 22 years, 1991 was the last year I grew so many and of such good quality but,it was on a different tree in a different house in a different place in a different life and, it was the memory of that 'other place' that brought me here.
One final tribute I should mention is a particular hero of mine Roy Castle OBE who died on the 2nd of this month in 1994 of lung cancer brought on by passive smoking in the Yorkshire WM clubs he worked in with my sister back in the 50's and 60's. Ironically my nephew Stephen my sisters younger son has just sold his house and left Scholes nr Holmfirth Roy Castle's birthplace on the 31st August, Roy Castles birthday. A humble man with a great sense of humour and a quietly committed christian he was above all a devoted Liverpool FC supporter like myself so he has got to be a 'good un' even for a Yorkist to stand in the Kop at the same matches with me and sing. We all remember where we were when 9 11 took place or when President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was shot, such events are shocked into your memory bank.
For me and the announcement of Roy's death was sitting in an ERF truck cab on the big truck stop at Lincoln's Inn Kennelworth nr Coventry listening to the six oclock news on BBC radio 4.It was a quite gloomy Friday evening and I was on my way home from Yalding in Kent, I kept a daily diary in those days so knew where I was and what happened.
I wrote a poem that night and the following day and designated it to Roy called 'Lost Summer Love' although it wasn't about him directly. If anyone is interested I will post it.

[pollygog]

Sums up this time of year really,the ripening bountiful harvest festival season, fields of golden wheat and barley followed on as Keats put it in Ode to Autumn ' 'Autumn mists of mellow fruitfulness etc;' such a good descriptive poem.

Here is my poem to the autumn written on the second and third of September 1994 as a tribute to Roy Castle entitled

LOST SUMMER LOVE

Cool mists in the morning and the call of wild geese
Days quickly shorten'd end summers brief lease
Yet still she haunts me my lost summers love
Phantomwise flitting through dreams like a dove

Sweet memories linger persistent and clear
Warm scent of your perfume your body heat near
Just feeling you breathing as you lay asleep
So precious those moments forever I'll keep

Their mudcups redundant the swallows are gone
From red autumn sunsets much briefer each one
For July borne the butterfly fluttered my heart
Saw capricious October that tore us apart

All frostslain the blooms that summers sun grew
As dead as the love of the woman I knew
Yet blissful remembered that August's hot kiss
And my summer lover, the love that I miss

[pollygog]

Been a very good year for dragonflies this year and todays unusually warm dry day no exception, came back home from an excellent pub meal at The Stag in Llangernyw and saw another huge dragonfly whizzing up and down around my wildlife pond,so, very quickly my camera was out trying to get an identity shot or just for the bugger to land so I could at least spot any identifying marks.Crouched down by the side of the pond I was suddenly aware of something struggling in the water, it was a bright orange koi fry about an inch long in the jaws of a water boatman busily chewing it. I knew Great Diving Beetles and dragonfly larvae could and do eat them but this beetle was half the size of koi fry yet it had caught and killed it! Managed to identify the dragonfly though it was an Emperor Dragonfly the largest UK dragonfly at 78mm, look it up on Wickepedia, it also tells you they are nonestop fliers, even to eat hence my not getting a nice posed resting shot because they don't.

[pollygog]

Just one plum tree left in the garden with a crop of plums on to ripen, its one I bought from a local garden centre in 2008 as a variety called Czar, it's supposed to come ripe two or three weeks before my Victoria but it has obviously been mis-labelled as two weeks after I picked the last of my Victoria's which was on 14th September the plums on this tree are still not ripe but just changing colour.
From the colour texture and shape of fruit and of leaves and growth pattern I worked out its a variety called Marjorie's Seedling.
Hopefully they are ripe before the frosts arrive, at the end of October usually, but I'm hoping for an Indian Summer to finish off a very good year.
My koi are now looking at their very best having been feeding voraciously through this long hot summer,the colours are just stunning and they are well prepped for the winter with lots of the high protein Japan Mix eaten. I bought 15kgs in July from Queni-koi and they have all but eaten it already, about 1/2 kilo left so I've ordered 15kgs of the Coppens Wheatgerm this week from them, still the best quality for the price.
I don't know if it was anything to do with the rainfree weather or the excessive heat but the amphibian population mostly disappeared through the very hot dry period in July/August particularly the newts, the are re-emerging of late and I saw a big one possibly a Great Crested last night on paving edge of wildlife pond at dusk, it piled in at a rate of knots so never got a good glimpse.
So, any day now I can expect a gathering of the local frog clan in the bottom of my Nexus as they settle down for the winter, nice.
One of my favourite occupations is trawling t'internet looking for bargains on Ebay and for our gardening fraternity members of this koi club here is a new addition,
Richard rrr5955 The Perennial Nursery Kirkwall Orkney
I bought a new variety of thornless gooseberry called 'Captivator' from him and they are excellent value at £5.99 plus £2.99 P&P for a large well grown quality two year old bush,I bought two and had the postage reduced to £3.90 that has got to be the cheapest on Ebay and more so considering where they were posted from and a very speedy delivery too.