Hooptedoodle #314 - October - Unusual Visitor (and other stuff)

Nice, sunny day today - cold first thing in the morning, then the sun shone all day. We have started putting some food out for the birds again - starting with a suet block on the apple tree. Much excitement among the humble sparrows and dunnocks, but we also got a couple of visitors we seldom see here. They are not rare locally, but they don't come here.

Motacilla cinerea - Grey Wagtail

Grey Wagtails - despite the name, much more colourful than their cousins the Pied Wagtail, who are regulars here. Whatever the weather did in 2018, it has certainly produced a lot of insects in October, so the Wagtails of all varieties are very busy, and very entertaining they are too.

Photos, as ever, courtesy of the Contesse Foy.

While we are on about insects, this is the time of year when we get one of our visits from Cluster Flies - they arrive in large numbers, but always in the same rooms, on the same windows (how do they know?). They are harmless, in the sense that they don't bite, and they don't contaminate your food, but the sheer number of them is a menace. In October they come looking for somewhere to hibernate, and really they are small enough to go anywhere they want, so they are impossible to keep out if they wish to get in. A few years ago we had a scary episode when the Contesse discovered there were thousands of the beggars wintering in the tiny gap between the window sashes and the frames in a bedroom which overlooks the woods at the back of the house. Regular checking for uninvited squatters, occasional applications of the vacuum cleaner and some understated Raid spray in the crevices in the window, and we have had no repeats.

Don't panic - this isn't our photo - this is just what they look like

Their life cycle is interesting, if you are not eating a blueberry muffin at the moment. They swarm and mate in the early Spring (when they emerge from wherever it is they have been hibernating), and the females lay their eggs near earthworm burrows. When they hatch, the larvae tunnel down, attach themselves to earthworms and spend a gruesome summer in the dark, underground. When the weather turns colder (about now, in fact) the new adult flies emerge in great numbers, and set off looking for desirable winter quarters such as our bedroom windows. So you get two swarms a year - one at this time, when they move into a sheltered winter home, then another in the Spring, when it's time to wake up and mate. As far as I know, that's about it for Cluster Flies - seems a pretty pointless existence, though the earthworms might have something to add.

We also have a fine crop of toadstools in the lawn, which is seasonal - lots of moss in the lawn, plenty of rain recently, and bingo - here they are again. The last mowing of the lawns (which will be a little late this year because the long Summer has meant that the grass is still growing after we would have expected it to pack in) will get rid of them, and things can go to sleep until next year.

Oh yes - Dod the Gardener has planted a load more crocus bulbs in the grass verge in the lane, so we should get a nice show in the early Spring. Something to look forward to.

[I think Dod goes to sleep in the Winter as well, boys and girls.]


***** Late Edit *****

It is now the following morning, and the aforementioned Dod has already dug out the toadies (they are unpleasantly squishy) and is now applying lawn sand to - that's right, you  guessed - the lawns. This stuff is to be applied by a push-along rotary spreader, so we have jointly been searching out the reading glasses and reading the instructions on the plastic sacks. 

Right.

The instructions on the bag say you should go to the manufacturer's website at www.gardenhealth.com to get the correct setting for your particular job and your particular spreader (ours is a Scott's EasyGreen - I knew you wanted to know this). In fact I don't live too far from our garden, so was able to do this without much difficulty, and took a shortened version of a large printout for Dod's enlightenment. Set to number 30 on the adjuster, it says, and do the lawns twice, at right angles, in a sort of tartan pattern. First problem I had was trying to do the arithmetic in my head, before my first coffee. The table from the website says this will give you about 112-135gm/sq.m - at two passes, I estimate that my 2 large sacks of lawn sand will cover about one-third of one of the 3 lawns, though each sack is claimed to treat 200 sq.m. We have something like 300 sq.m of lawns. Spinning of head - does not compute.

Dod sets the trap-door in the bottom of the spreader to number 30, and can see right away that the thing is going to empty itself far too quickly. Thus he proposes to guess a reduced setting, see how thickly the sand goes on, and go over it again if it isn't enough. That, we agreed, is easier than trying to scoop the stuff back up if we run out. Something bothers me about this. Apart from the collapse of my ability with fractions (which is only one of a number of such concerns...), I have this mental image of a groundsman, half a mile from the nearest electricity, at the end of the cricket field somewhere, probably working in the rain, desperately trying to get a signal on his mobile phone to access the flaming website.

The triumph of gratuitous science.

What are we doing here? The lawn sand manufacturer has instructed us where to get details of the spreader settings (which may or may not be correct), but it isn't exactly handy, is it? Which banana thought this was good customer service? I suspect there will be a big increase in the number of mental health issues among gardeners and groundsmen in the near future.

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