Some missteps this week
This week: The Orchard view; They’re biting again!; Some missteps; Metamorphosing;

This week has been a “milestone” week. My car has passed 150,000km. These are not all my kilometres though, as I bought it with 143,000 on the odometer. But it is a milestone none the less.

The distance I travel in the car in a year is only around 1,200km, so it it unlikely to be around in another 40 years, to see 200,000km!
I had to go down to Stari Grad on Friday morning. Leaving the village, the road winds between old stone walls, above them are Olive trees, laden with ripening fruit.
As the road passes between the hills of Hum and Purkin kuk, there is a view of the perfectly flat Stari Grad plain. What caught my eye was a layer of white mist, spreading east along the plain.

I thought it was a little strange, because it is the wrong season here for mists and the air was too warm. However temperature inversions can happen at any time of year .
My next thought was about the poem “To autumn” by John Keats (1795 – 1821). That “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”. Then I went back to concentrating on driving as there was other traffic on the road as well.
A few minutes later as I turned onto the main road, I saw it was thick smoke from a bonfire, not mist, but the smoke was being held low by an inversion.
Later, back at home I realised that my Myrobalan Cherry Plums have completely lost all their leaves.

These fruit trees are the first to have blossom in the spring, the first into leaf and then the first to show bare branches.

Another poem came to mind, Fall, leaves, fall: die, flowers away.. by Emily Brontë.
However our greatly extended autumnal season, beginning in late August and ending in late November has few of the vibrant colours of Autumn in northern climates. But then none of the cold, damp fogs I remember from growing up in Yorkshire either.
The weather has been so strange in the last six weeks. We had a cold spell at the start of September, and now a warm spell. The natural world is just not sure whether it is coming or going, or whether it has just been!
Having taken the covers off my solar water heater at the end of last month, because the water was not heating as much, today the safety valve has been liftiing as the water temperature reached 95°C.
A Victoria Plum in the Top Orchard, which came into blossom again in September, has now set small fruit. They will not develop and ripen though.
Following recent rains, weeds are growing like crazy everywhere. But along with weeds, my autumn planted vegetables are looking good. So you can’t have everything….
The Orchard view
I have been looking for the autumn crocus and finally this week I have found some.
The yellow flowers are wild and used to grow in the paths behind my home. However this year they are completely absent.
I did find some at the edge of a small copse though.

Why they have died out on the path is strange though. A couple of years ago there were several groups, then last autumn not so many and this year, none at all…
In my orchard border I have the cultivated purple autumn crocus which I have planted.
They survive, but don’t seem to multiply, so I presume that the conditions are barely to their liking.

The early Daffodils are all sprouting in my planter, which is very early. Once again, I make the link between the cool September we have experienced and then the warm sun this month which has tricked them into thinking winter has passed.

In the polytunnel I have potted up a dozen strawberry plants this week. These are from a pair of runners I have kept from one of my prolific fruiting plants. Once these have rooted in their individual pots, I will be planting them in the strawberry bed.

We had some strong winds last weekend and I saw this week that two of the poles on my Arbour have broken where they have gone rotten.

It is probably not surprising because after 9 years of the elements and I have never given any treatment to them, as they came “treated”, they have reached the end of their life.
They’re biting again!
Mosquitoes have been a real nuisance this year. They started biting in late may and continued up to September when the temperature dropped.
I put away my Dipterol anti-mosquito spray because I thought the season had ended.
Then with rain and warming temperatures again, they have started hatching, biting and breeding again. Usually by October we have seen the back of them, but this week, whenever I have been outside, I have needed protection on exposed skin.
I have also lost most of my crop of early Mandarins to flies.
They were ripening nicely, then suddenly started to drop. Each one has been bitten by a fly which has laid eggs inside the fruit.

As the seasons continue to be affected by climate breakdown, we are somehow going to have to manage the affects this has on everything around us.
Some missteps
I often use mind maps as a way of visualising steps in a project which will lead to the end goal. Sometimes I physically draw a mind map, other times, it is literally a thought process in my mind.
The difference is often whether I need to record something for future reference or not.
People have built whole careers on the back of Dependancy mapping, to provide a visual representation of how different parts of a project interface and are dependant on one another.
In between two of my buildings there is a snickleway which leads up into the east orchard.

There are two deep steps leading up from the courtyard, then a flight of eight steep steps at the other end. It is too steep to get any of my machines up into the orchard and I really need to get the mulcher and rotavator up there.
First I need to move bags of compost and aggregate, but with some 15 heavy bags to move, I want to use my sack barrow. However the two steps at the start of the snickleway are an impediment.
Also in the courtyard, I need to improve the access to my main buildings, a job also waiting for when the courtyard is paved. See… some more dependences.

The width of both are 90cm and a while ago I decided that I would use the nice large stones at the snickleway entrance, as the first step of the flight up to my patio.
I started with a pickaxe to lever the top step stones out. They have been in place for probably more than 100 years and did not want to move.
After a lot of effort, I brought out the three stones and set the first one in place in its new location. However try as I might, I could not get the bottom stones to budge, even by a centimetre.
One stone in particuar 60cm long, and 35cm deep was just right for the new steps. Being large (and heavy) it will be ideal for the first / last tread in the flight.

Leverage didn’t work and neither did a larger wrecking bar. Being limestone it is very heavy and no matter what I did, I could not get it to budge. I am going to have to bring my baby JCB up from the orchard to remove and relocate it.
With the first stone in place at the bottom of the flight, I brought the second up and bedded it in. It nicely matches and interlocked with the first.

The third stone though, I just could not get to sit nicely with the other two.

I decided not to spent any more time on fiddling with it, knowing that two stones will be replaced by the single large one, one I can get it out!
Metamorphosing
Having had a good clean up of the small flower bed outside my kitchen window, this week I saw a small snake on the soil. So being curious, I went for a closer look.
It saw me and moved PDQ into the citrus orchard and out of sight. It stayed just long enough for me to identify it as a Balkan Whip Snake.
However what I did then see was the posterior of a big caterpillar, wriggling into the soil.

After weeding and then planting bulbs, followed by a top dressing of compost, the soil is quite loose and the front half of the caterpillar was burrowing away into the soil.
This is another African Death’s Head Hawk Moth, Acherontia atropos, an endemic species in my part of Southern Europe.
Just before they metamorphosise into a chrysalis, the caterpillars change from the bright green with blue flashes, to a brown colour and the little tail at the back shrivels and blackens. They then burrow into soft soil to create an underground chamber, when they change.
The following two short videos show those changes.
I’m going to leave it for a couple of weeks to change, then I’ll dig it up and move it somewhere safer.
This little garden Is under the “drip strip” from a roof, so it will become waterlogged in winter and the caterpillar will not survive there.
All that was left after the digging was complete was a small hole, which I covered to prevent anything trying to get in and attack it.

There really is a secret world beneath our feet that few of us ever have the privilege to see… NCG