It’s a bee! It’s a fly! It’s a bee fly!
Sorry about the crap picture, but I’ve been trying to get a shot of this screwy little bugger for two weeks. Uncle B and I have both seen him bumbling around the garden. I got one quick snap of him today and then there he was, gone.
He’s a funny little customer with a long, thin proboscis. Weird; like a tiny, hairy hummingbird (but no hummingbirds in England, alas). He hovers, he drinks nectar and he’s shy as a bastard if you try to get near him.
Turns out (thank you Google), he’s not a bee at all. He’s a fly that looks like a bee (probably to keep predators off). A bee fly, or bombyliid (thank you Wikipedia). Kind of an unpleasant piece of work, this — it’s a parasitoid, which means a parasite that always kills its host.
Bee flies lay their eggs in the nests or burrows of other insects, and the larvae eat the tenants. Yum!
I gather these things are kind of rare, so I should utup-shay about the ug-bay or we’ll probably have the conservation people on us.
April 20, 2009 — 7:49 pm
Comments: 16
Pollarded? We were damn near coppiced!
We had a couple of trees pollarded this week. That one on the left? The thing that looks like a stump? That’s one. The tree on the right was pollarded some years ago.
Pollarding is a form of arboriculture practiced around these parts since the far off misty mists of time. You take a tree and lop it straight off about ten feet up from the ground. After which the cutoff bit explodes in new growth: long, straight new branchlets. After five or seven or fourteen years, you lop these off for firewood, or nice straight structural members, or weaving baskets.
Only some kinds of tree will put up with this abuse (ours are willows, I think) but, believe it or not, pollarded trees are healthier and live far longer than maiden (unpollarded) trees. They aren’t top-heavy, they don’t have gnarly branches to split off and they are apparently metabolically in a state of perpetual adolescence. It’s good for the ecowotsit of the forest, too: it lets light in for richer undergrowth and little animules. Hippies love it, though, so…grain of salt.
Coppicing is similar, but they slice off the trees only a couple of feet from the ground. This won’t do if you have livestock or wild deer that would nibble at any new growth.
Once trees have been pollarded, you can let them go wild again. This ultimately results in extraordinarily top-heavy trees and very, very little light penetration. Dark, creepy woods, in other words. Epping Forest is apparently like this. Some of the twisty, spooky trees you see in churchyards — where the upper branches writhe out of gnarly fists — were formerly pollarded.
We only have a small cluster of pollarded trees at the end of the drive, and we contemplated letting them go. But the lads talked us into having them done.
The lads. Yes. We has gardeners!
April 8, 2009 — 8:06 pm
Comments: 12
Death watch in the toilet
Not many mornings I wake to find myself in my underpants, balanced on one foot, cupping my ear to the wall.
No, seriously. Not that many mornings at all.
This morning, Weasel awoke to the cheerful clatter of death watch beetles eating Badger House. Xestobium rufovillosum is a beetle native to Britain that eats gouges into ancient wooden beams and taps out clickity lovesongs in Spring.
Usually, they come in to the house on fresh oak planks when they are still moist, and spend a few hundred years chewing neat holes and lazy channels in the structural members. Pretty much all ancient houses and churches have some woodworm damage.
Badger House has plenty. It’s just, we were hoping it was all old. Fresh woodworm is bad mojo. They are damn near impossible to kill, and subject to more costly quack cures than arthritis and erectile dysfunction, put together. (Which sounds really awful, you have to admit).
This particular woodworm is called ‘death watch’ on account of the clicking, which you are most likely to hear on still, quiet Summer nights. While you’re all sitting around waiting for Grammy to kick it. And so, by extension, the sound came to be regarded as an omen of death. But, really, omens of eating the fucking house down around my ears is depressing enough.
We have to get someone in to look at this or we’ll go howling psychotic.
April 6, 2009 — 7:02 pm
Comments: 32
This is my job. It’s what I do.
Nothing. Nil. Nada. Bupkis. Sweet fuck-all. I have been a complete and utter waste of human skin since I was rousted out of my nice warm bed by a hammering at the door at the cruelly early hour of one. Pee-em.
Near as I can piece it together, we set fire to the chimney last night. Again. A small fire this time, but apparently scary enough to make me grievously overdrink myself afterwards. Apparently.
Apparently, Uncle B was able to get the sweeps out on an emergency basis. Apparently. Again. That was them hammering on the door. He didn’t hear it because he was in the back of the house doing…I don’t know…his job or something. I’m unclear on this point.
So I answered the door like Mad Madam Mim, with one open eye and my jeans-front wadded up in my fist. I’m becoming heavily dependent on this crazy American woman gambit, you know.
Anyhow, the chimney really shouldn’t have sooted up this fast (our last chimney fire was on January 8). So, we probably need a bigger-diameter chimney lining (>£1K) and/or a new stove (>£1K). Probably both.
We think the old stove was Frankensteined together from pieces and is missing some bits. You might think a stove would be a simple thing with few important constituent elements, but you’d be SO WRONG. Jesus, what’s the matter with you?
It’s supposed to have some fire bricks and the air intake probably isn’t working right, which means our combustibles aren’t completely combusting but are laying down a coating of flammable soot on their way up the chimney.
Or some shit. I don’t know. We’re coming to the end of the heating season, so I refuse to think about it yet.
If you’ll excuse me, I’ve waited patiently for twelve hours for some hair o’ the dog…
March 26, 2009 — 9:02 pm
Comments: 31
It had to be ewes…
We’re having unseasonable warmening around here this week. Sunny, low fifties (you have to poke extra buttons to make the BBC forecast tell you degrees Fahrenheit, but I make the effort). England is famous for its relentless rain and gray, but when it’s good, it’s heart-stoppingly fabulous.
I intended to be an good weasel and continue weeding the walk around the house — the place stood empty for some years and there’s shrubberies growing up between the slabs — but I’ve weeded my way around to the shady spots now. As my old mother used to say, “honey, get out in the sun more.” And she’s dead now, so her wishes are sacred.
I spent most of the day sitting in a lawn chair with a big cup of coffee, propped up with Uncle B’s best zoom lens watching wildlife. Some of the ewes in the neighborhood have dropped lamb already, but the ones in the fields around us haven’t yet. They time the lambing so it’s all staggered.
These ladies are from the field directly behind. They are sporting a fresh Brazilian bikini wax, so I’m guessing their time is about nigh. At least, I hope so.
When the neighbor’s sheep turn up with freshly shaved bottoms, you don’t like to ask.
March 18, 2009 — 9:22 pm
Comments: 15
Got jammed up unpacking today…
So please enjoy this perfectly flipping enormous spider that sat down beside her and frightened Miss Weasel away when I was in the garden this afternoon.
Spiders. Brrrr.
March 5, 2009 — 9:55 pm
Comments: 22
Stuff…
Hey, lookit! My favorite limbless, decapitated torso made it from Rhode Island!
Yep, the last of my stuff was delivered today. That means no storage unit to pay for. It also means half the rooms in Badger House are stacked floor-to-ceiling with boxes.
It isn’t as bad as it looks (please god). An awful lot of it is packaging and padding. And stuff that can go. And stuff that can go on e-Bay. But right now, the whole house is like one of those little slidey puzzles with the tiles that you shift around to get the numbers in the right order.
Slidey puzzle. Yeah. You know what I’m talking.
Anyhow, it’s taken me the whole day to make a clear path to the stairs, the front door and the pissoir. I am, how you say, pooped. Pardon the lameness of today’s offering.
Much more of this heavy lifting and I’ll develop the scary man-arms of Michelle Obama.
March 3, 2009 — 8:24 pm
Comments: 17
DING DONG!
When we first looked at Badger House, the front doorbell was one of these big pull-chain dealies. It somehow vanished after the sale. Not complaining; the seller left plenty of other useful things behind (including a kitchen table and chairs). But we have been bereft of doorbell since we moved in.
You can still get this style of bell pull. The question is, what sort of bell do you connect it to on the inside? Turns out, they’re all electronical and previewable online now. Oh, how we laughed!
Uncle B sort of liked this one, but thought it should end with “just a minute!” followed by a flushing sound. I was partial to this one, but he insists I’d have to answer the door in my Tinkerbell costume.
We were naturally torn between this one and this one, so we decided this would be a good compromise. It doesn’t apply, but it seems like a fair halfway point. Plus, it would confuse the hell out of people. Bonus!
Oh, who am I kidding? There’s only one that would possibly do.
You know what? I think we’ll just get a bell on a string, after all.
March 2, 2009 — 7:50 pm
Comments: 18
These are not the newts you are looking for!
The crested newt is Britain’s largest and most protected amphibian. Reptile. Whatever. Neighbors told us under no circumstances to mention newts, if we were to find such at Badger House, for fear of bands of marauding hippies with legal superpowers. Utup-shay about the ewts-nay.
This, however — I swear to god — is a smooth newt. Ain’t nothing endangered about a smooth newt. Smooooooth noooooot.
I’m still repairing the brick edging around the garden. It’s going pretty well, but we haven’t had that many sunny days (it’s been in the mid-forties for weeks, though — I’m not complaining!). I dug up a brick and, in the gravel underneath — a good four inches down — was a pile of tiny dessicated newts. Seriously, little dudes were as stiff and dry as sticks.
It crossed my mind that they might have crawled down there and joined the Choir Eternal, but I had a feeling I was looking at a Circle of Life thing. I reburied most of them, and propped this guy up on a brick.
Sure enough, after five minutes in the sun, he blinked. And next time I looked over, I was newtless.
Cheer up, minions! Spring is coming…!
February 27, 2009 — 7:31 pm
Comments: 9
Moss!
I love moss. Flop down beside a trail anywhere (a thing I do often) and you’re sure to find a clump of moss. Which, on closer examination, is doing something spectacular. But really, really small.
The Audubon Society in New England is famous for building boardwalks all over their properties, so you can hike right out onto landscapes you couldn’t possibly reach on foot otherwise. Like great heaving waist-high landscapes of rolling primordial moss and fern, as far as the eye can see. Positively prehistorical. I loved those things. I would sit there for hours. It wouldn’t have surprised me a bit if a brontosaurus had come galumphing down the boardwalk.
I spent the nicer days last week relaying the low unmortared brick wall around the garden that had been knocked about when the new shit farm was installed. Some of those bricks have fine mosses on them. Fine mosses.
And I got to thinking how much I’d like to encourage mosses to grow in all the moss-appropriate places on Badger House. And I got to thinking how I’ve moved to the wettest, geekiest, gardeningest island on the whole planet (with the possible exception of Japan). So I wasn’t at all surprised Google turned up the British Bryological Society.
Mosses are simple souls, I gather. Keep them wet and keep them acid and they will…thrive, you hope. They are also unpredictable.
Anyhow, Project Moss is going to be fun! It’s sort of uncharted territory. Groups like the BBS are more about finding and identifying mosses in the wild. The few definitive books, like Fletcher‘s, are about keeping field-collected specimens alive in pots. Making existing mosses flourish with gay abandon is going to require original science.
Weasel science!
February 24, 2009 — 6:59 pm
Comments: 17