September 1st, 2010
I’d like to make some blackberry wine, so I went to a lane near where I live to pick some only to find there weren’t any. I’m not sure if I was too early, too late or if someone else had got there first.
When I told my friend Jenny about it, she offered to take me somewhere she knew where she thought there would be lots of them. It was a lovely walk through fields and over stiles in beautiful countryside, and eventually we got to the blackberry bushes. But they weren’t much better! I was expecting big juicy blackberries that I could pick lots of in a short time. There were some, but not many and they were small and hard. I decided not to pick any as I thought they wouldn’t be sweet enough for making wine.
Jenny picked enough to make a blackberry pie. That didn’t take long and we were soon retracing our steps through fields and over stiles. We just had one more field to cross before we reached the lane where the car was parked, when a large chestnut horse came trotting out of a shed and headed straight for us. He wasn’t there when we went the other way.
I was getting anxious because he was so big and was coming at us so fast. I moved over and stood by the hedge hoping he’d ignore me, but he didn’t. His head was taller than me and I found him quite intimidating. I knew I had to try and keep calm and not panic. I stroked his nose and talked to him, then I decided I needed to make a move. I walked past him steadily but not too quickly, and started heading across the field to the stile.
I hoped he would let me go and trot back to his shed, but he didn’t. He followed me, and I could feel the weight of his head on the rucksack I was wearing as he nibbled at it. I slipped it off one shoulder and swung it round so that I could hold it in my arms as I continued to head for the stile.
Still he didn’t leave me. As I walked, his nose was against my back. At this point Jenny decided she’d better do something, and she gave him her bucket of blackberries. That kept him occupied for a few minutes which gave us both time to get over the stile to safety. I was so relieved to reach the lane.
Thank you Jenny for giving up your blackeberry pie to save me from a very scary situation.
Tags: blackberries, countryside, field, friend, horse, stile, wine
Posted in day out, food, nature | No Comments »
August 27th, 2010
I don’t usually mind wasps. I’m happy to get up close to them and to bees to try and take photos of them. When they’re in the garden on the flowers they sit still for a little while, and sometimes I can take a shot of them before they flit off to another flower.
I didn’t like the one I saw today though. It must have come in the open office window, because the first I knew about it was when it was flitting round my drink of apple juice. It was flying all over the place and wouldn’t keep still. I tried to get it out of the open window by gently guiding it with a sheet of paper, but it wouldn’t go. Instead it went to the next window. The one that was closed, the one I couldn’t open because the handle was too high up for me to reach.
I couldn’t concentrate on my work because I didn’t want to lose sight of it and accidentally put my arm on it, or worse take a drink of my apple juice while it was in the glass.
So my two colleagues came to the rescue. One of them was standing on my chair trying to reach to open the other window while the other one was on the other side of the office. I kept out of the way as they started batting the poor wasp backwards and forwards with magazines. Even though I was nervous in case I got stung, it made me laugh to see how one small wasp made two grown men behave!
Eventually one of them got it, and it fell to the ground, dead. Now why hadn’t it listened to me and gone out of the open window when I told it to.
Tags: apple juice, chair, office, wasp, window, work
Posted in nature, work | No Comments »
July 24th, 2010
I love macro photography. It makes it possible for me to see the beautiful intricacies of God’s creation of flowers and insects etc in wonderful detail.
I love the undulations of this bumble bee’s wings. I would never have seen that without macro photography.
Tags: bumble bee, lavender, macro, photo, photography
Posted in garden, nature, photography | No Comments »
July 19th, 2010
The poppy season is just about over now. Well, it is here in my garden and in the bit of wasteground that I’ve been visiting every day on my way home from work to take shots of the most stunning poppies I’ve ever seen.
I’ll miss them, but I’ve got photos to remember them by. To me, that’s the whole point of photography. To capture something ephemeral at the height of it’s beauty so that I can go on enjoying it.
This is one of the wasteground poppies, growing on a heap of rubble.
Tags: ephemeral, photo, pink, poppy, wasteground
Posted in flowers, photography | No Comments »
July 11th, 2010
Last year, I grew some runner beans. I enjoyed watching them grow, and I loved being able to walk down to the bottom of the garden, pick them, cook them and eat them straight away with all their freshness and flavour intact.
This year, I decided I’d expand my vegetable garden. I’m growing runner beans again, but I’m also trying courgettes, beetroot, lettuce, parsley and coriander. I already had mint and sage.
This salad is made from a couple of beetroot leaves and a few lettuce leaves cut from the growing lettuce. I’ve added some chunks of cheese, some sunflower seeds, and half an orange pepper.
It was lovely – fresh and tasty, and it was so nice that I had prepared it from leaves I had just picked in the garden.
I think I’m going to enjoy growing vegetables!
Tags: food, garden, home grown, photo, salad, vegetables
Posted in food, garden | No Comments »
June 23rd, 2010
We’ve had some really good sunny weather for the past few weeks, which has given us some lovely clear skies. That means that I’ve been able to take photos of the Moon on lots of consecutive days!
My ambition is to get a shot of it on every day of it’s visible phases, and then to make a mosaic of them. I must be nearly there now! I must organise and collate the shots and see which days I’m missing.
Even though I’ve only got a fairly small point and shoot, and the quality of my photos aren’t as good or detailed as someone with better equipment, I’m really pleased with my results. The camera is small enough to carry everywhere with me, which I need to do because the skies can change so quickly.
I’ve had the situation where I saw the Moon in a lovely clear sky when I came out of work, but when I arrived home 10 minutes later it had clouded over, and stayed like that for the rest of the evening! Now that I have my camera with me, I stop and take some shots as soon as I see it.
Tags: craters, gibbous, June, Moon, photo, photography, waxing
Posted in Moon, night sky, photography | 1 Comment »
June 19th, 2010
I’m really enjoying the beautiful poppies that are around at the moment. This one’s in my garden. I’ve had these lovely pink and mauve poppies around for several years, and every year when they’ve gone over, I spread the seeds around the garden and hope that some of them will come up somewhere! Thankfully, they do!
I go out first thing in the morning when a new poppy is out, and I can get photos of it looking clean and beautiful like this one. A little later in the morning, it will have pollen all over it looking as though someone has tipped some sand into it!
I’ve been watching bees visit them and I’m fascinated to see what they do! They get right down into the bottom of the flower, lying on their side and they work their way round underneath the frondy bits – is that the stamen? They seem to hold on to a bunch of them with their legs while they wipe their mouth up and down them, presumably collecting pollen. At least I think that’s what they do. It’s all so fast. I must try and take a video of it.
I’m still enjoying my little photoshoots every day after work when I stop at a bit wasteland on the way home, but it’s lovely to have poppies in my garden where I can see them from the kitchen window and pop out any time I want to have a look or take photos.
Tags: bees, garden, mauve, photo, pollen, poppies, poppy, seeds, stamen
Posted in flowers, garden, nature, photography | 2 Comments »
June 14th, 2010
I love poppies. They’re so beautiful, but so delicate and fleeting. I have some of the big pink ones in my garden, and I know that I must take photos as soon as I see one of them come out, as it will probably only last for a day or two.
About a week ago, I was driving to work, when I noticed a flash of pink and purple out of the corner of my eye. I stopped the car, and found a bit of wasteland where the most amazingly beautiful poppies were growing on a pile of rubble, bricks and soil! I was amazed! They’re the most beautiful poppies I’ve ever seen, and they weren’t in a beautiful garden, they were just on a pile of rubble!
I couldn’t stop then as I had to get to work, but I made sure I stopped on the way home and took as many photos as I could, reaching out over the rubble and snapping without being able to see what I was taking. Lots of them had to be deleted, but I just kept going until I had some I was pleased with.
I’ve been stopping on my way home everyday since then, because the poppies change so quickly. First there are buds, then they open out and display their beauty to the world, then the petals fall off one by one, and a beautiful fat seedhead is left. But there are lots more to come out and take their place.
I wonder how long they’ll last. How long will I be able to look forward to my little photoshoot on the way home?
Tags: mauve, petals, photo, photoshoot, pink, poppies, poppy, purple, rubble, wasteland
Posted in flowers, photography | 2 Comments »
June 6th, 2010
We’ve had some lovely hot, sunny weather lately and I’d been enjoying being in the garden, sitting on the bench reading my book or eating my lunch and catching up with the gardening. I wanted to clear one of the overgrown flowerbeds and make it into a vegetable plot.
Today I was planning to carry on with the clearing. I was just checking my emails before going outside, when I heard thunder. I looked up to see rain pouring down like stair rods! My washing! I’d washed lots of tops and T shirts and had laid them outside to dry flat in the sun. Now rain was hammering down onto them. I opened the back door thinking I’d run out and rescue them, but when I saw the rain I knew that I would have been soaked to the skin before I’d even got to them, so I stayed inside and watched with dismay as they got soaked instead!
This is a photo of my paved garden path which turned into a pond with more than an inch of water on it!
It’s stopped raining now and the sun has come out again, and my T shirts will have to start drying all over again. I’m sure we needed some rain, and we certainly got a lot of it, even though it didn’t last for long! My garden will have benefitted from it, won’t it?
Tags: bench, garden, gardening, rain, soaked, thunderstorm, washing
Posted in garden, home, weather | No Comments »
June 3rd, 2010
As anyone who follows my blog or my Flickr photostream will know, one of the things I love to take photos of is the Moon. I love studying it, and looking at it through binoculars, but that’s fleeting. If I take a photo of it, I’ve got a record I can go back to.
My ambition is to take a shot of the Moon on each day of it’s visible phases, and then make a mosaic of them. It’s a while since I started to do it, but our cloudy English weather has made it frustratingly difficult to do.
But during April, May and June so far, we’ve had some lovely sunny weather which has given us clear skies and I’ve managed to take shots of the Moon on quite a few days, some of them being phases that I’ve never managed to get before.
So I’m getting quite excited! The good weather has been forecast to continue, so I may achieve my goal before too long!
The photo at the top is of the last Full Moon taken at 10.30pm on 27th May, and the one below was taken at 8.30am this morning when the waning Moon is 66% illuminated, one day away from being at it’s 3rd Quarter.
Tags: blue sky, evening, Flickr, Full Moon, Moon, morning, mosaic, phases, photo, photography, waning
Posted in Moon, night sky, photography | 2 Comments »
