Hello and welcome back to our blog, today we thought we would catch you up with the latest goings on with nature on our premises here at The Sign Maker.
We have seen beautiful changes of summer to autumn from the changing of colours of leaves to spectacular fungi growing in the garden! We have also started a new wildlife habitat that we can not wait to see grow.
Be sure to keep reading to get all the autumn feels and take a moment to slow down and enjoy the natural world.
Wildlife Habitat Creation
We have been busy with our latest environmental project, Twig Mountain! Kate and Shaun the directors came up with the idea. If any of you are keen gardeners and do your own composting then you will know that twigs take a very long time to bio-degrade, so long in fact that Kate was picking the twigs out of compost that was ready to use and she thought ‘there has to be a better way to do this’. So she started investigating and discovered that some people choose to compost the twigs separately. There is a couple of reasons for this, firstly it means that the twigs compost at the same rate so when they finally mild down it will all be ready to use at once. You do not have to burn the twigs but instead, allow them to break down slowly. Finally, it creates amazing wildlife habitats so what's not to love!
The mountain is a little more like a hill at the moment but as time goes on we will continue to add more to the pile.
In and around the Gardens
The leaves on the trees are starting to turn beautiful shades of orange and red, there lots of berries on the bushes and some amazing fungi growing on the property.
One of the weirdest ones we have spotted is these fungi growing known as ‘Devil's Fingers’ which after some research turns out it is quite rare to the UK. Originally from Australia, this fungi starts life under the soil in a round/egg shape which then pushes through to the surface. Shortly after the egg-shaped fungi is above ground it ‘hatches’ to show this amazing red tentacle-shaped fungi. When we say this stuff smells wow does it! There is actually a reason for this, the bad smell attracts insects. Insects then land on the fungi and the spores attach to the feet of the insects and these insects then leave spores where they next land. These fungi are inedible.
The cotoneaster bush is full of berries this time of year and makes for a wonderful backdrop for photos of our products. There is a fun old wives tale which states that the more berries you see in autumn the harsher the winter will be - what are your thoughts for this winter - here in Devon we can pretty much guarantee one thing - RAIN!
The Maple trees always create beautiful autumn displays and its no different for this beautiful Maple tree we have here at The Sign Maker.
