The ladybirds and the swallows stole my morning. Twice.

Alternate titles could be. “This is why I don’t get any housework done” or “The Spouse is grumpy with me again.”

Time has a habit of quietly slipping through my fingers, when you couple this with the fact that I am very easily distracted it can quickly add up. A lost morning here, a wasted afternoon there but luckily time is relative and a wasted morning in the The Spouses eyes is time well spent in mine.

I went outside to start a load of washing, (yes my washing machine is still outside) and as I walked down the steps to the water tank to turn the tap on, the ducks peeped at me, reminding me that I hadn’t fed them. So I changed course and fed the ducks and wandered around in the veggie garden for a bit looking for hidden nests. The ducks have a pen off to the side of the veggie garden and I pulled down part of the fence so that they had access to all of the garden.

On the way out of the garden I noticed that the new growth on my cherry trees was a bit curly and deformed. The damage wasn’t that widespread so I nipped back inside, (walking straight past the empty washing machine) to grab the secataurs and a bucket so that I could snip off all the diseased parts of the tree to stop it spreading.

Once I started to snip off the leaves I could see that the curling was caused by clusters of little black sap suckers that looked like a cross between a flea and an aphid. The weather has been quite humid here lately with lots of rain so I am on the lookout for mould in the garden as well. Aphids produce a honeydew, which the ants love to eat and the sight of ants crawling all over a plant is often the first sign that aphids are about (see I am getting distracted again) The sticky honeydew is also the perfect environment for  black sooty mould to appear and  cause the leaves to shrivel and die as well.

The cherry trees had already been well chomped on by the stray cows that wreaked bovine havoc the other day and now aphids were chomping on the new growth. It isn’t looking good for cherries here this year at all.

As I was busily snipping away at the tips of the tree I noticed that the ladybirds were all over the tree as well, hiding in the folds of the leaves eating aphids and having ladybird sex.

So there I was mid-snip faced with a dilemma, did I stop removing the leaves full of aphids and let the ladybirds do their job or did I keep on snipping?

I kept on snipping.

Normally I would burn the diseased leaves of a plant but that was impossible as these leaves were also covered with ladybirds, ants and small spiders. So I emptied the leaves out onto  a tray and grabbed my camera instead. I also started to worry that the ladybirds would lay their eggs on these soon to be dead leaves, thinking that their babies would hatch out to a feast of aphids, so I moved all the ladybirds that were having sex onto the honeysuckle, as that still had pockets of aphids chomping away on it.

When I came inside to edit the photos I could hear The spouse banging away rebuilding parts of the balcony, the guilt got the better of me and I thought I better go and offer to help before I got sprung sitting in front of the computer. Again. The Spouse didn’t need me getting in the way my help so I wandered off up the driveway to my unfinished studio.

I have been watching the swallows zooming in and out of my studio for days now I hadn’t seen any signs of a nest or any swallow poo, so I assumed that they were just hunting the trapped insects that were flying around the ceiling. I went and sat quietly in the back of the shed watching them as I daydreamed about shelves and worktables instead of bare concrete floors.

As I was quietly sitting there one of the swallows flew in underneath a piece of loose sisalation in the ceiling. I was quite surprised by this as swallows make mud nests on the  side of buildings under the eaves, so I traipsed back down to the house to grab my camera and before “The Spouse could say I thought you were doing laundry” I had lost another hour.

The swallows are definitely making a nest in the ceiling of my studio and that makes me inordinately happy.

But.

There will be a couple of small problems, like not being able to close the front roller door of my studio for a couple of months so that the swallows can fly in and out but I am sure I can work around that. The Spouse isn’t impressed but he will humour me and will bide his time to say I told you so when my work space is full of swallow shit.

Unfortunately when I began to edit the ladybird photos, as I am still learning how to use the macro lens, most of them were crap. The depth of field was wrong, or the photos weren’t as crisp as I liked and shots that looked ok in camera were blurry on the screen. So skilfully avoiding The Spouse I went back outside with my camera and took some more photos. A lot more.

I was much happier with these and before I knew it most of the day had vanished and I still hadn’t done any laundry.

Fast forward four days and I am still messing about with the same batch of ladybirds and cherry leaves. I left the leaves in a container on the table outside so that any ladybirds could fly away before I burned the leaves. As per usual I forgot about them and only went back to check on them yesterday. The leaves were shrivelling up and the aphids are dying but the ladybirds are still madly crawling all over the leaves chomping away and mating.

This reinforces my belief that I should just leave things alone. If I had not snipped the leaves, the ladybirds would have done the job for me and cleaned up most of the aphids. As it is by being a hasty human and interfering with the natural order of things here I have mucked up a mini eco-system.I have moved most of the ladybirds down to the cherry tree which still has some aphids left on it. I found a leaf with ladybird eggs on it so I have wedged that into a nook in the middle of the honeysuckle and I am keeping an eye on it. The Spouse cracked the shits and ended up doing the laundry himself, making me eligible for worst housekeeper of the year award again and finally five days later I am pressing publish.