Wildlife around our new home

Blackbird virgin flight

Blackbird virgin flight

We have moved to the countryside and it goes without saying that we are surrounded by what is commonly called wildlife. Some so far have not introduced themselves in person. They prefer to leave their business card. And they do so in numbers, well, we could have done with less.

Fresh molehills

Fresh molehills

Some make themselves heard in the darkblue very starry nights we have here. Quite certainly it will be some kinds of bird of prey. We hope to learn their names over the course of the years. Just across the small road to the west there is a field of maize and from out of there a pheasant has made its voice heard every now and then. Also, the area is home to bats. They come in the latter part of the blue hour hunting for whatever dares to be in the air at that time of the fading day. In spring it was cockchafer. Cockchafer grubs are living in the soil in good numbers and all sizes. There is a lot of oak trees around.

Cockchafer grubs

Cockchafer grubs

dead-beetle

wildlife-puppa

Swallows and barn martins are treating us to their flight shows. On a good day they chase off the falcon and after their success seem to give eachother what looks like a flown high-five. For the past two weeks or so every now and then they gathered on our roof chatting cheerfully and with a lot of hubbub – as they always do, even while hunting. I was wondering whether this could be some ritual to prepare for their upcoming migration. A family of redstarts is living in and around the barn. And wagtails search the meadow each time it is freshly cut. Up in the oak trees lining the small road magpies live and crows. And bussards draw their circles on the spotless summer sky – every so often chased away by either the crows or the magpies.

Wood pigeon

Wood pigeon

 

Heron

Heron

There are pigeons. Or doves for that matter. Currently, which is late August, the wood pigeons have their ramshackle nest from sticks in the back part of our barn. They have at least one chick, fluffy and dark grey. We have had a grey heron visiting and a stork in spring. A flock of cheerful sparrows is living in our front garden. The two purple hawthorn trees are theirs and the yews next to the hawthorns too. And we had blackbirds breeding in the corner of our patio. They had three clutches and raised twelve chicks.

Daddy blackbird

Daddy blackbird

 

Blackbird flegling in June

Blackbird flegling in June

Some wildlife has failed to leave while it was still time. I found the mumified carcass of a marten in the old hey in the barn. It was stuck between an almost ancient bale of hey and the brick wall, baring its teeth. A somewhat eerie sight in the twilight of an old barn. And our neighbour’s dog managed to cut one lad’s life short by catching a root vole in what is to become our back garden.

Late marten

Late marten

There have been butterflies almost right from the start. But with the meadow now having more flowers than grass they seem to have become much more abundant. Also there are two large bushes of privet in the front garden which have attracted a great many and all sorts of insect visitors during bloom. Plus we planted some flowers in our garden-to-be, amongst them lavender and sage, a white hollyhock and a few roses. The white butterflies obviously cannot resist the little yellow flowers that have sprung up in our meadow, presumably some kind of hawksbeard. It is their place to look out for a date. They dance in pairs or threes or fours up into the sky.

white-butterflies

butterfly

But other butterflies, like the small tortoiseshell, seem to clearly prefer our white Echinacea. The species that seems to be very abundant is red admiral. It is very eye catching with its brilliant black and red wings.

Red admiral

Red admiral

There are hoverflies as well and of course bumblebees and ladybirds. We have had a nest of white tailed bumblebees in a stack of old straw in the barn all summer. It seems abandoned now, as could be expected by September, but there are still bumblebees around. Some built their nest in crevices of the brick wall of the house. And there are midges or rather mosquitoes. I have seen the majestic hornets, the tottery daddy longlegs, and only recently, some golden-brown very delicate dragonflies have paid their visit. The place here not only is rural, but there is a peat bog not far, too. So dragonflies do not come as a total surprise.

Borage visitor

Borage visitor

It was to be expected that a certain proportion of our plums would be claimed for dinner before we could harvest them. Tiny pink larvae were eating them up from within. We have put up large barrels to collect rain water from the downpipes. The vessels got inhabited in a blink. Almost from the start little swimming beetles raced around. Later the larvae of great diving beetles caught whatever they could catch. They are known to be greedy.

Bumblebee

Bumblebee

As I write this it is a sunny late summer afternoon. Temperatures have gone down to the mid-twenties. The old ivy on the wall of the little stable is in its early bloom – much to the solitary bees‘ liking.

 

A Garden-to-be

Our former garden

Our former garden

This is a photo of the garden we had in the past. It is an allotment not far from Stuttgart. The rhododendrons have grown taller than two metres in over 10 years in their specially built sheltered raised beds with acidic soil. There is an extra bed of ferns, there are apple trees, a pond with irises and a huge walnut tree amongst far more. We have moved away from there, some 600 kilometres north. Instead of loamy the soil here is sandy. Instead of mountainous the area here is lowland and flat. When I chose the rhododendrons for our former garden in Swabia, I watched carefully to pick those that could deal with temperatures below minus 20 degrees centigrade. We need not expect winters getting that cold here in the north of Westphalia with the coastline of the North Sea just over 100 kilometers away. Instead we’ll have to keep in mind that winds can be rather rough. We are no beginners as to gardening, but here conditions are so different to what we are used to we can consider ourselves starting all over again.

Garden-to-be in late April with snow flurry

Garden-to-be in late April with snow flurry

This would not be an old farm if it did not come with some land. There is a front garden with bushes and yews and hawthorn and a small white lilac tree. But in the back there is all meadow. Over the past so many years it was cut to feed cattle. When we moved in earlier this year the grass was dense and looked juicy.

Yellow meadow

Yellow meadow

When the wind went over it, it moved in powerful waves like if it was an ocean of green. We started mowing it with our sit-on mower at some point in May. It grew so quickly we had to cut it almost every 10 days because otherwise it would grow too tall for our mower to handle. Come August the meadow has changed from the uniform green of grass to a mixture of yellow and a great many shades of greens. It was time to take out some very old, very much used books again.

Very used old books

Very used old books

 

Muckheap in February

Muckheap in February

The old farm comes with two stables. The larger one was used for cattle, the smaller one for pigs. Both are built parallel to each other separated by the pit for the muckheap. The basis of the pit is made of neatly laid bricks. The times in which animals were kept here are long gone. The muckheap must have been disused for quite some time, 15 years at least. What was left in there had a lot of time to rot away thouroughly. Which is exactly what it had done.

Muckheap in June

Muckheap in June

 

Composters

Composters

The material resting there was moist and dark and densely inhabited with all sorts of creatures of decomposition: worms of all kinds and larvae and little shiny blue-black beetles. I carefully scraped all of it from the bricks and mixed it into the various composters when setting them up. With all the little helpers already in there the process of decomposition could start straight away.

Muckheap early August

Muckheap in early August

Muckheap mid August

Muckheap in mid August

During the process of clearing the old straw and hey from the attic and the barn I put one compost heap where the muckheap was. It is a good place. The pit only opens to the north, it is sheltered from all other sides by walls of buildings. It gets some sun but only for a few hours each day. This heap is keeping its moisture nicely. It grows little mushrooms each night. The pumpkin seeds I put in there in July are going strong.

Garden-to-be in early April

Garden-to-be in early April

Garden-to-be in late May

Garden-to-be in late May

One wall of the pig stable faces east where the place of the muckheap is. The opposite wall faces west and overlooks much of the meadow. We learned that at the foot of this wall there was a rumble stretch. Apparently a certain amount of debris had been dumped here over the years or rather decades. I took up the challenge of clearing this away. It took me a couple of weeks to dig through it.

Garden-to-be in early June

Garden-to-be in early June

 

Old tiles

Old tiles

Some very nice old floor tiles emerged. However, most of what came up was broken bricks of all sorts. There was a rusted key, some shards with floral designs and some broken glass from old fashioned bottles. Now that this strip is cleared I can start building a bed for my kitchen herbs just in front of the old stable.

Garden-to-be in mid July

Garden-to-be in mid July

As I write this dusk is closing in. The sun sets much earlier now. We had a pretty hot and rather windy day, the last in a row with temperatures around 30 degrees centigrade. During the past couple of days countless white butterflies kept dancing in the heat of the day above our yellow meadow – in pairs or in threes. If the night sky is clear it takes a dark shade of blue and we have the most beautiful view of the stars twinkling. Just recently we saw a very bright falling star.

Four legged neighbours

Four legged neighbours

Anybody longing to learn more about the garden we had to leave behind? Go for it.

 

Straw

oldstraw-hey

When visiting the farm for the first time, we knew in an instant there would be a number of challenges connected with our new home. One of them was to move out the old oak-style furniture. In the end it all added up to some two tonnes of chairs and tables and wardrobes that went. This sounds a lot. But there was a challenge bigger than that waiting for us: old straw.

Old straw in the barn as it looked in January

Old straw in the barn as it looked in January

In fact it is old straw plus old hey. Either partly in the form of bales and partly loose. The straw/hey was packed mainly in two spaces: the attic and the barn. The straw and hey had been in there for at least the past 15 or 20 years. But part of it might have been sitting there for significantly longer – considering the state it is in.

Old straw in the barn in early August

Old straw in the barn in early August

The stuff in the attic was mainly bales. They were tightly and meticulously packed and in places some strength was needed to haul them out from underneath a beam. The bales were easy to handle but it was an awful lot. Even after far more than 20 loads have gone so far, there is still one load of bales waiting to be given a lift. At first the bales got loaded onto a trailer through a hole in the ceiling of what is called the „Deele“, the large farm working-entrance hall.

"Deele" with trailer to load some bales of straw from the attic

„Deele“ with trailer to load some bales of straw from the attic

Later we started throwing the bales through one of the windows in the attic with the trailer parked underneath in the meadow. One advantage was that we could feed more bales onto the trailer as it had not to squeeze through the farm door when leaving. The other advantage was we did not have straw distributing itself in the house all over the place. The straw and hey is being used as bedding for livestock.

Old straw in the attic

Old straw in the attic

The stuff in the barn is a different story alltogether. Much of it is loose with some bales hidden in between. The bottom part of it, sitting directly on the brick floor, shows signs of a slow process of decomposition. Large brown sheets have formed, in a way resembling papyrus. In the far left hand side corner of the barn some kind of white-tailed bumblebees have their nest in the old straw-hey mixture. They are quite not amused about anybody manipulating their home. They’ll let you know instantly with a do-not-mess-with-us buzzing sound. The bumblebees will abandon nest in September and have a new one next spring. Thus we can clear away the nest once the bumblebees have left it.

Paper-weight egg found in the old straw

Light-weight egg found in the old straw

Even within the straw and hey in the barn unexpected treasures emerge: an egg as light as paper. I know there used to be a henhouse on the premises, but it got pulled down very long ago. How old this egg might be? We’ll never know.

compost-built-up

By chance I came across a book outlining a method of decomposing straw and hey. It sounded interesting and like some sort of solution for some of the loose stuff we have. There is no shortage of space to pile up heaps of straw for letting it rot away. We needed to have compost heaps anyway for all the grass we had to cut and for weeds and other stuff that had to go from where it was currently growing. We now have composters of different styles working. One is built from old oak beams we found in one of the stables. Two are simple heaps set up layer by layer.

compost-oakbeam

I spent days putting up compost piles and packing old straw out of the barn wheelbarrow by wheelbarrow. While piling up the old material it had to be mixed with nitrogen fertilizer of some sort. I decided on pellets of manure. It keeps the little helpers going while they eat up all the old straw and turn it into compost for gardening. Apart from nitrogen – and phosphor and potassium – they need moisture. Consequently I kept watering the heaps while it was hot and dry in July. With the beginning of August we got some nice and steady rain that works well with the heaps of straw. They seem to be rotting quite nicely, feeling moderately warm inside.

straw-compost-fence

straw-compost-stables-0

I stuffed pumpkin seeds into one of them. I do not hope to be harvesting any pumpkins in autumn. I wanted a plant producing great big leaves to cover the surface of the heap and prevent it from loosing its moisture. The heaps of straw are big and it takes a while to water them and there is so much else to do. The first half dozen seedlings are showing and maybe there will be more to come.

Pumpkin seedlings

Pumpkin seedlings

straw-compost-mushroom

With part of the straw having been in a state of decomposition already there are fungi and mushrooms appearing on the straw within days. The tiny grey mushrooms are pretty short lived. They last a day or two and melt away quickly. I am curious how the heaps will develop.

august-rain

As I write this it is overcast and has cooled down considerably compared to just a week ago, when it was still hot and dry and kind of like an old fashioned summer in the countryside. The steady rain had started early this morning and now everything is thoroughly moistened. The pumpkins are doing their best to grow large leaves.

tripod

Settling in Gradually

Photo by Denny Boehm

Photo by Denny Boehm

Three months ago we were handed over the keys of the house. We are moving in gradually. There is a feeling of both familiarity and newness. We keep coming across things, we had not realised were there, things that come as a surprise. Old doors and windows burried and forgotten in the straw in the attic. Signs of habits long kept but somewhat outdated: all tools are labelled with the name of the owner and date of purchase. The umbrella too.

Underneath wallpaper

Underneath wallpaper

Underneath wallpaper

Underneath wallpaper

The main part of the house is said to date back to around 1893. Some parts might be much older. The vital parts like bathroom, kitchen and heating are pretty contemporary. A fact we are very grateful for. They are in good working order and we need not touch them for now. There is still enough work left. It goes without saying that the whole place has been designed for the every day work of a farmer. Accordingly we’ll have to convert part of it into a printroom and another part into a place where books will be bound. While these more substantial changes are being planned for, we tend to the lesser chores, which have to be tackled just the same.

Baler Twine

Baler Twine

All space used for work or living is on ground floor level. But of course there is an attic. It is not fitted for living in, unless you are a pigeon, an owl, a martin or a barn swallow, a marten or whatever sort of mouse. Some 20 years ago the whole of the attic was tediously packed with one layer of bales of straw. Currently we are step by step, meaning load by load getting rid of the old straw. From underneath or in between the bales some nice things emerge that have been burried there untouched for decades.

Impression of an old door having been in the straw for decades

Impression of an old door having been in the straw for decades

 

Buttons in a bucket

Buttons in a bucket

The most peculiar of them certainly is a bucket filled with buttons. But also there is an old stained mirror, an old farmhouse door, feeders for chickens, parts of an old fence, spare bits for a tractor which is long gone (it has left its keys in a clear plastic box with many others), piles of snippets of all sorts of tiles and a number of huge coils of baler twine. A farmer from one of the surrounding villages comes round every now and then and we load his trailer to the brim with the old straw. When I am up there in the attic piling bales of straw to have them at hand for the next loading there is somebody carefully watching. It is a tiny male black redstart. He is not on his own there, the whole family is living hidden somewhere in the attic. I could watch all three of them outside when working in the garden. They can be quite talkative at times.

Feeders in the attic

Feeders in the attic

 

The garden-to-be is currently just a somewhat spacy meadow. On an old photograph it looks like if it had been used as pasture land. (We found the old field gates packed away in a shed.) Just beyond the fence in the back two large cherry trees are the happiness for some small flocks of starlings. They have a hang for the ripe cherries and are feasting there. For the past so many years the meadow was mowed and the grass or hey fed to cattle. This spring there seemed to be only one sort of grass and it was growing very quickly. We hardly managed to mow it in time before it grew long enough to clogg up our sit-on mower. However, the growth has slowed down and there are other species showing now.

Yellow meadow

Yellow meadow

Some species of hawksweed appeared in July turning most of the place into a sea of yellow. In one area there is a large population of mugwort. Somewhere I spotted dark mulletin, and out on the margin the odd poppy.

Trough

Trough

plant-pot-01

plant-pot-02

For a small scale start we re-planted some pots that have been overlooked for some time. With the help of a neighbour and his traktor we moved one trough to the entrance of the yard. Some of the shrubs had dried and had to go. I put in some flowers and grasses to accompany what might be a dwarf juniper which proved to be determined to stay.

plant-pot-03

In the large room that is to become the bindery we found a basket-like plant container. With a bit of help we managed to move it outside and put in a species of Moroccan mint. I gave it some wallpepper for company. Wallpeppers are abundant all over the place as we have dry sandy soils and enough sunny days for them to strive.

plant-pot-basket-01

Old carpet in the study

Old carpet in the study

Apart from tidying up the attic and gradually developing the meadow into a garden, there are some lesser tasks in the house. The room that is to become my study was fitted with a rather old and worn carpet. The process of replacing the carpet with tiles is ongoing.

New tiles in the study

New tiles in the study

More new tiles in the study

More new tiles in the study

 

Morning light

Morning light

Almost empty

Almost empty

The room that is to become the bindery is being used as storage space on a preliminary basis. First of all we moved all the old furniture there that was to go. Once all of this had gone the space was almost empty for a day or two. Then the movers came and we piled everything in there that had been stored in the container for over a year. And at times we needed to make space for the trailer to be loaded with bales of old straw.

Reloaded

Reloaded

 

With trailer

With trailer

As I write this the wind outside plays with the oak trees‘ foliage in the night. I know there are mosquitoes out there. And owls. I have seen them sweeping the night sky without making a noise like if there was a shadow flying by. We could do with some rain. The past days have been mostly sunny and windy at times. And hot. The sand from the dry soils is blown everywhere.

White hollyhock

White Hollyhock