Cold, Wet and Cloudy

A bit nippy round the extremities on our early morning walkabout.
It was all of 6.5C and still damp after an earlier shower.
So much for the days planned activity of mowing my lawn.
Cutting longish wet grass uses up the mower's batteries much faster.
The situation was made worse by a couple more showers during the day.

We managed to dodge them for our mid afternoon walk.
By the look of the distant clouds we were just missing more rain







One bright note was a little flower skulking under my front hedge



No idea what it is or how it got there.

Top temperature today was 16.2C but as I write this it is diving down to single figures again.

Signs of Autumn

Now we are in the Meteorological Autumn the dewy mornings are making all the spiders' webs in my lawn stand out

What Does a Dog Have To Do ....

.... to get its share of that jam tart he's scoffing?

I'll try my 'have pity on a hard done by dog' look

Unidentified Bug

Just about to drop some items in our recycle bin when I spotted this minibeast



Body length about 7mm

It even let me take a bit of video



Spent quite a while looking at scores of pictures trying to identify it.
Is it an instar of some shieldbug?

Another view



If any visitor could help with the identification that would be brilliant.

Monday Montage

Here we are again. Another week flown by.
Last week's WidsMob Montage modified photo



was correctly identified by Ragged Robin, The Weaver and Wilma as



an apple. Hard luck Adrian. Should have stayed with your first thought.

It is actually a blood apple. The type which has red flesh as well as skin



There is a tree not far away which overhangs the footpath. It always drops dozens of windfalls each year. What has fallen so far this year are not fully ripe and all seem to have a type of end blossom rot. They are as hard as nails to cut through. I have never got round to tasting one.

For this week's modified photo, something from my own garden



If you think you know or would like to guess what it is please leave your guess in the comments.
They will be revealed, along with the original photo, next Monday.

A Frog and a Froghopper

The Summer display in my hanging baskets was well and truly over. The Fuchsias came to nothing. They stayed still at about 3 inches high. Fortunately the trailing Lobelia put on a really nice display. Though watered every dry day even they eventually gave up the ghost.

I emptied and relined the baskets then filled them with new compost ready, I hope, for a Winter and Spring display. Round the perimeter are trailing Winter flowering Pansies. Taking up the centre portion are bulbs; Hyacinth, Dwarf Iris (all those are blue) and Puschkinia libanotica (Russian Snowdrops) which have white petals with a blue stripe. I've not grown those before so we will see how they get on.

As for the garden wildlife. A couple of days ago I spotted a young frog on the path



This one was a bit larger than others seen recently so may be a two year old.

While I was troweling compost from the bag to a hanging basket what should decide to leap in to have a close look at what was going on? A common Froghopper (Philaenus spumarius)


 

Weird looking creatures.

Finally a butterfly landed in the garden.
A Small Tortoiseshell

 

A bit of a rare event here this Summer.

Earning Its Keep