Another beautiful sunny autumn Sunday. The plan for today was to see how far we could get digging out some ponds and scrapes to help intentionally store water on the land in the mini-nature reserve. We’ve tried to time the digging for after the froglets have fledged, but before the ground gets too wet and heavy again. We’ll have to dig by hand – we don’t have the funds to hire a machine – but maybe this way is better, albeit more labour intensive.

We made a decent start, fuelled by coffee and homemade brownies…

This is a panorama taken from inside the shelter – with food forest to either side and the nature reserve straight behind the shelter. The white post marks a small oak sapling, daughter of our ancient boundary oak, presumably sown by jay or squirrel. At it’s base are some of the wildflower plants we put in earlier in the year – we spotted Water Avens and Ragged Robin still going strong.

One of our plotholders has a more mature pond and has donated some rhizomes of Yellow Flag Iris and cuttings of Water Forget-me-not for the scrape we dug out. These are both plants of boggy ground so they should be ok when the scrape fills up as well as while the water level is low as it is currently.

We spotted a good number of frogs large and small, a few Speckled Wood and Small White butterflies, a handful of bees – and a lot of very fresh fox poo, but no foxes were in visible today!

Huge thanks to Karen, Reet, Nolice, Abdo, Derek and Janet for today.