Hedgehogs and other animals

The resident hedgehog has been shifting around in its box and although it did not eat for a couple of nights, the food had gone by yesterday evening and the top up amount I put out last night went by this morning. Based on this, it doesn't look like he/she is in full hibernation mode, but perhaps easing into it with the odd midnight snack without going outside.

Garden-wise the operative word is wet. The pond is definitely full after having become quite low back in mid-October. Field beans sown a month back have just emerged in the last day or so. These were planted as green manure that will enrich the soil with their nitrogen fixing nodules and become good compost in the spring. I finally got round to planting out my purple sprouting broccoli. This was a bit late as they are quite pot bound now, but first i had to eradicate nasty perennial weeds, sow the lawn, then build the raised bed and put in a deer fence to stop them being decimated in one night. Elsewhere in the garden the odd marigold decides its time to flower and add some colour to the drab palette. Other than five ladybirds under the bark of a firewood log I've not seen any bugs since around the 1st of the month. Its just been too wet. The multi-storey hotel bug hotel and robin box that I built over the summer came in useful as i was able to transfer the sleepy ladybirds one by one very carefully on a leaf into a drilled out log in the ground floor apartment. Overall its been a good year from a nature home and habitat construction point of view: both bluetit boxes were used to raise a brood, a hedgehog is sleeping in the hedgehog box, at least five ladybirds are in the bug hotel, plus the pond is now a regular bathing place for the garden birds, and may have helped contribute to the hedgehog deciding to come and live in our garden.