Woodland Paths, Swallows and Homemade Wooden Coasters and Table Mats

Wild Oxlip

Although I've more than enough to do in the garden, I can't miss the chance of walking through the local woods at this time of year, because the wild flowers there are looking wonderful.  Most of my wanderings have been through the wood close to the smallholding, but I've also made a special visit to Shadwell Wood, in North West Essex, to search for wild oxlips.  These lovely woodland flowers are confined to a small area of East Anglia (covering parts of Essex, Cambridgeshire and Suffolk) because they thrive on the boulder clay soil found here. Oxlips resemble the cowslip and the primrose, and flower between March and May.

In my local wood, I've come across lesser celandine...

And violets...

And one of my favourite flowers, the bluebell...

I'm fortunate that Essex has some of best bluebell woods in the country (Norsey Wood, near Billericay, is world-renowned as a bluebell wood). The bluebells are just starting to look fabulous, creating a shimmering blue haze with a beautiful scent. As the climate is generally warm and dry in Essex, wild bluebells don't spread outside the shady, damp conditions of their wood (I'm always amazed when I visit other counties, such as Cornwall, where I see bluebells growing freely in the hedgerows). Because of this, bluebells in Essex are an indicator of ancient woodland i.e. woodland that pre-dates 1600 and the first maps.  In many other areas, where bluebells grow out in the open, they're not used as indicators because they can spread to newer woods.

Harry in the Local Bluebell Wood

The ramson or wild garlic is starting to flower, too - another plant with a powerful scent! 

We have some growing in a small bed on the smallholding, but this isn't flowering yet.

The fields next to the wood aren't farmed and have been left as set-aside for years.  Some of my hives are located here, and this is fantastic for them, because right now these fields are full of dandelions that the bees, butterflies and other insects love...

Peacock Butterfly on a Dandelion

Elsewhere I've come across lambs, which is unusual in this part of the world, because there's little livestock farming here...

And my favourite bird, the swallow, has returned.  They're often sitting on the wires outside the smallholding...

Bees

After I discovered I'd lost one of my colonies, I then found that one of my other hives had lost its queen over the winter.  Where there isn't a queen laying eggs and producing new bees, the colony becomes weaker, so although these bees were healthy enough and were bringing in pollen, they were also gradually dying out.  To save these bees, I've united them with another, stronger colony and, to do this, I've put the two hives together, one on top of the other.  Because the two colonies would fight if they were simply thrown together, I've put a sheet of newspaper between them.  By the time the bees have chewed through this paper, they will have become used to each other's scent and so won't be inclined to attack each other.  The weaker colony will then become part of the stronger one under the one queen.

 

Homemade Coasters and Table Mats

When we realised that our coasters and table mats were looking a bit shabby and needed replacing, we decided to make our own out of wood.  We went to our local carpenters' workshop on the hunt for some off-cuts of oak, and were really fortunate that they agreed, not only to give us some, but to put them through their table saw.  Once cut, we sanded and then used linseed oil on the wood.  We've now created some chunky table mats and coasters, and I think they'll last longer than any that we've bought (which, frankly, never seem to last long...).
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  Finally, I came across this in the woods.  Is it a cauliflower fungus?  That's my obvious guess.  I'd love to know!