Pottering About

Or more precisely, potting about.
I have been gathering plants to use in four 14 inch (35cm) hanging baskets. As they arrived as plug plants they have needed potting on until they are sufficiently robust to plant in the baskets.

Here I have six Scented Trailing Nemesia Vanilla Lady on the right and the rest are mixed Pansy plants:



There are also 35 mixed trailing Lobelia which came as mini plug plants:



They look like good value as there must be about 6 plants in each plug.

On the way back from an excellent fish and chip meal at the Wagon and Horses, South Reston, yesterday lunch time I picked up a few primulas from the local Post Office and general store. They will fill a few gaps where some have died off:



Following a night of heavy rainfall the back lawn is starting to disappear under water again. Also I think things have been too wet for the Great Tit to find suitable nesting material as there have been no visits to the nestbox so far today. Yesterday she was fairly busy so this is the state of play:



I think the item top left is a feather which is caught in a spider's web. It initially caused some problems last night as it fluttered when the wind was blowing. Anything moving starts the recorder. Fortunately modern DVRs have a section where any part of the picture can be marked as 'ignore this'.

Home Sweet Home

Great Tit nest building starts in earnest. Just a couple of short clips:

Has She Finally Made Up Her Mind?

After seven days of visits to the camera nestbox Mrs Great Tit arrived with a piece of nesting material. It also looks as though she caught the spider which kept building a web in front of the camera:

Blue Sky and White Clouds

As it looked like being a fine day yesterday I set up a camera outdoors to take a photograph every five seconds. Now the bulky leylandii is no more I have a better view of the sky. This is a time lapse video made from just over 1200 shots. About 2 hours sky watching reduced to 40 seconds:




I wonder whether you spotted the one frame where a Wood Pigeon photobombed the view of the clouds:

 



As for the camera nest box - both Great Tits have continued to make visits every day so far.
No sign of any nest building activity as yet.

Monday Montage

Last week's WidsMob Montage picture caused a few problems:



The Weaver of Grass chose correctly.
It was indeed a sheep (looking a bit pig like):



Thank you to all who had a look and tried to identify it.

Maybe this will be a bit easier:



Can you work out what I photographed?
Please leave any guesses in the comments.
They will be revealed, along with the answer, next Monday.

The Labyrinth

Saturday being a reasonable day I decided it was time to plant out some of the things I had bought this year. First were a couple of Chinese Lantern plants to put in containers. I used to have one a few years ago but for some unknown reason it suddenly died:



Next were a couple of Virginia Creepers. After much thought I had decided these would look good climbing over the large stump left over from felling the Leylandii in the bottom corner of the garden:



While I was doing that I noticed that many of the crevices in the stump were full of old damp needles so I set about cleaning many of them out as they would cause the stump to start rotting.  It was while doing that I noticed what appeared to be a round hole which at first reminded me of a mouse hole. It looked about the right size:



Closer examination showed me that there was a spider's web at the entrance:



with a flat sheet at the bottom:



Looking even more closely I could see the whole hole and tunnel were part of the web:



After a bit of thought and research I have come to the conclusion it is the web of a labyrinth spider.

 

Apparently they can be quite deep. Built by the female spider the eggs are hung from the roof deep inside the labyrinth of tunnels.

Fluttering About

What a glorious early Spring day it was on Thursday.
By late morning the temperature had reached a heady12.5C
I decided to check the heathers to see what was about.
There along with dozens of bees were three Small Tortoiseshell butterflies:



Making a change from yellow were some small clumps of Chionodoxa forbesi (Glory of the Snow):




Yet another brief visit to the camera nestbox by both Great Tits this morning: