Making our Meadow Blog

Opportunity knocks

Having completely wrecked my back I have had to take a day off work, not only in the office but also in the garden (well I have manger to sow some bean seeds but apart from that nothing...). Normally this would be immensely frustrating since whenever I go into the garden I only see the endless list of jobs I need to do. Now I feel trully freed from the shackles of my own tyranny and free to observe the delights of my garden.

Pond shrinks again!

Well filling up the pond was a bit of a waste of time it has
shrunk back to where it was last week already, leaving the liner dangerously exposed
to sunlight and the Pondcam high and
dry! Having checked with other local pond owners who have not experienced this
sort of evaporation it makes me worried that we may have a leak. If that is the
case what can we do? I wouldn’t mind turning it into a bog garden but I don’t
know where I can put another pond as a replacement. It would need to be the
right side of the Max proof fence and everywhere is already chock full of vegetable
beds and the meadow. And I don’t think Nicole will let me get rid of her
beloved frogs…

Meadow pics

The dry meadow and the overgrown path.

Time to cut the hay?

The heatwave continues and the pond has dropped another few inches in a couple of days. I'm not sure if it a is a leak or just evaporation. If it is a leak it opens up the prospect of that bog garden I always wanted to make...

The parched conditions are also drying up the mini meadow with all the red clover and most of the flowers already going to seed. Only the later flowering Devils bit scabious and St John's wort are still blooming away, so they must stay. They make a tunnel which Max (and Nicole!) love to push through to get to the pond. Perhaps  it is time to cut the hay, before it gets too dry to manage? The neighbours' cats have flattened most of the grass down (is there no end to the ways they find to annoy me...?) which is annoying from a visual point of view but may be irrelevant to the invertabrates who dwell there. Probably a lot less detrimental than cutting it, but it needs to be done. However it does make me worry about the orchids I am planning to try to plant...

Pond update

We hacked back the rank vegetation which covered the pond on Wednesday and discovered just how much it had dropped - I reckon about 18"! So I topped it up, which is not ideal but really needed to be done. It has dropped 4" since then, which does not bode well. But we can now enjoy the wildlife in the pond again! Frogs toads and dozens of newts!

Pond update

We hacked back the rank vegetation which covered the pond on Wednesday and discovered just how much it had dropped - I reckon about 18"! So I topped it up, which is not ideal but really needed to be done. It has dropped 4" since then, which does not bode well. But we can now enjoy the wildlife in the pond again! Frogs toads and dozens of newts!

First attempt at video assembly

The images i have had sitting on my netbook for a month and a bit have finally been downloaded onto o machine with enough guts to process a couple of thousand images. I tried to batch convert the files to make them suitable for an HDR time lapse but the images generated by Photoshop were huge and not of a type that coudl be easily used in Videomach. I tried downloading and using Artizen and Virtual Dyb as recommended on the CHDK site but i found that the Artizen package needed to be downloaded in full rather than the free version and could not get Virtual Dub to work at all on the files i have. So i slimmed it down selected only the images which were well enough exposed on the ground (leaving the sky overexposed) so at least i could get a feel for how it looks. Not great I have to admit but it's a start:

Shame about the camouflage flapping about and the flaring but fairly interesting all the same...

Meadowcam update

On Sunday I returned to Ali's meadow and checked up on the Meadowcam. The battery is working fine and is nicely topped up with solar power, while the camera has taken plenty of images. I downloaded these onto a netbook and then restarted the camera. The memory card capacity had been reduced by about 10% over the course of a week so i estimate that at he moment about 6 - 8 weeks between data collections should be fine. I also set up a dome hide and removed the Trailcam - which had not really captured anything very interesting. I hid for a while and spotted a pair of green woodpeckers, a courting pair of Stock Doves and most interestingly a Snipe near the new pond. It was was only after I left that i realised that I had not checked the camera and that I had left behind my hat! I will need to go back before 8 weeks!

Meadowcam Installed!

In spite of some slightly dodgy weather and the fact that Max had us up half the night, we decided to go for it and set the meadowcam up today while we have the chance. With help from Steen, Colin, Ali and Nicole and entertainment provided by Max, we got there about 11 and after settling on a new location near the pond Ali has just had dug, installing the post and setting up the camera only took about about an hour. I will go back in a week to check up on the progress, the settings etc and also to realign the solar panel with the optimum position.