The remaining hens do not understand why they weren't let out for a late afternoon run, and stood on the roosting board in the hen house, peering out of the window into the front garden like prisoners. I feel sorry for them, but assuming we do have a fox with a taste for chickens in the vicinity, it seems sensible to break the habit of providing free range chicken dinner for at least a few days. July has been a bad month for fox attacks in the past. I've a vague feeling it might be tied in with their breeding cycle and the point when vixens need the most food for their cubs. The hens are still laying, and so far I haven't collected another of the peculiar, long, thin, soft shelled eggs, so maybe they were from the hen that vanished.
Sombre news came in a group email from the secretary of the beekeepers association that somebody had a hive stolen from their apiary in one of the neighbouring villages. She warned us to be vigilant of our own bees, and to watch out for any equipment offered for sale in suspicious circumstances. I consoled myself with the thought that my apiary is about as secure as it could be. Not quite as safe as the hives that one member keeps inside the military correction centre at Colchester, but pretty good. They are out of sight, the track to our house is a dead end, and it stops at the house, so any hive thief has a choice between lifting the hives out through the hedge to an accomplice in the lettuce field, or barrowing them the two hundred yards back down the meadow to their vehicle, which they would have to park in our front garden or else down the lane in full view of the lettuce farm.
I spent the day weeding the gravel outside the blue summerhouse, where I am planning a Nicole de Vesian inspired (rip off) scheme of clipped Mediterranean evergreens. So far I have planted five Santolina cuttings, which is all that I have, and three of my tray of Teucrium fruticans 'Azureum'. I think I've got enough Teucrium chamaedrys, the low growing wall germander, and enough of the small leafed myrtle Myrtus communis 'Tarrentina', but I'm short of box. I had a low strike rate, for reasons I have not yet divined, and those that did take haven't finished rooting into their nine centimetre pots enough to plant out yet, so there'll have to be a gap for now. The readers' offer free lavenders (just send £5.95 for postage and packing) did very well, with only one of the forty eight mysteriously shrivelling and dying by degrees, and are ready to go out.
I ran the hose on the planting in the railway garden as I worked, getting up to move it every few minutes. Some of the heathers have been hit by the drought, and I cannot find one dwarf berberis at all. It was a very small specimen when it arrived, smaller than I honestly imagined it would be when I ordered it, and I'm afraid I should have put a cane in next to it when I planted it. Now I simply can't remember where I put it, and though I've walked around peering at the carpet of thyme and sedums and trying to spot it, I haven't seen it yet. Maybe it has quietly and secretly died, but with any luck I've been looking straight through it and it's in there somewhere.
The thymes have been covered with bees, honey bees as well as wild ones, but for some reason the honey bees have been giving the lavender flowers in the Italian garden a wide berth. There have been bumbles on them, and a tiny little wild bee that's not even a centimetre long, though you can tell they're bees because they have coloured pollen loads on their legs. It's an attractive thing, a thyme carpet, at this time of year. I have odd moments when I wonder if I should have done the whole front garden as a gravel planting and not bothered with a conventional border at all. Then I remember how long it takes to weed the railway garden and pick all the fallen leaves out it, and do the same for the South African inspired gravel strip at the entrance, and the Italian garden and beach garden in the turning circle, and I have to admit that I couldn't cope with a whole front garden's worth.
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