Garden time; June Bugs and Mice

The weather has been so warm and wet lately, everything is growing  when it’s not being soaked. We had one day of continual rain then showers and a really hot day on Friday. All seems a bit behind, the Peonies which usually have finished flowering by now are only just coming into bloom.The air was filled with scents of all the flowers and June Bugs.  They’re all over the place but seem to do no harm!

The short dry break was used by the farmers to cut the first crop of silage and a lot of the now yellowing fields have been sprayed with slurry, which makes the Lungau a bit ripe.

I’ve found that the dratted mouse has taken up residence in our row of broad beans.  Its called a Wuehlmaus, and when I looked it up, its Myodes Glareolus or the Bank vole.  Most of the websites I found considered it cute, except for one that condemned it as vermin, carrying  disease.  It  can leave  holes in gardens, with runs underneath where it stores its foot. It eats fruit and nuts and some quietly said it nibbles roots -quite!  Quite how we’ll deal with it I don’t know, no doubt there’s more than one. Linda also said it could be our resident mole, but he tends to just leave big heaps of earth not neat openings.

Those Sparrows

They saw that I’d been busy, weeding and topping at the soil on my flower bed.They know also that the supply of seeds has run out and all I have is Sunflower seeds and peanuts, which they struggle with.  So what do they do, they chose a nice afternoon and spend it making earth baths in the soil, they’ll be expecting me to do it every year now!