Category: Nature

Bee Positive

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So as some of you may be aware, Kate has wanted bees for a long, long time and constantly goes on about it. We have many bee books on the shelves, a beehive shaped composter, bee jewellery, and the list goes on. However, I have not been a strong advocate, as I think we’re probably a little too busy at the moment and whilst making our own honey sounds like a nice idea, I suspect that it would be a lot more work that it seems and it would probably annoy a lot of our neighbours too.

In the meantime, we always try and plant lots of bee (and butterfly) friendly plants that will hopefully help them prosper and attract them to the area. And we’ve put up a little bee house, to help them out (as mentioned in some earlier posts, 1, 2)

Well it looks as if our efforts have started to really pay off, becasue we noticed today that we now have have our own colony of bees!

The dance

I was looking out of our kitchen window after breakfast and noticed the shadow of something swarming around. I assumed it was going to be flies or mosquitoes or something, but didn’t think they would be big enough to really make a shadow. So I thought I better go and see what it was and what they were attraced to. Turns out, we had a load of bees (or at that time, I thought possibly wasps) attracted to our stack vent!

Bee butt

As it turns out, the tiling around the pipe hasn’t been fixed properly and the tiles have slipped down, leaving a gap around the pipe, which the bees have decided is the best place in town to stay for the summer.

Excuse the mess

So this is going to be something we’ll have to add on the the list of jobs that need doing. It probably explains why the bathroom ceiling has mould around that area. The roof tiles have a few missing bits and pieces, so it might be worth doing a proper job on it all.

Anyway, I tried getting a few close up shots (easier said than done), and I am fairly sure that they are Tree Bumblebees (Bombus hypnorum) which are a relatively new species to the UK.

Photoshopped

Importantly, they tend to only stay for the summer before moving on and don’t cause any damage. So we are going to try and see if we can cohabit with them for a little while and see how things go.

Whilst I was clambering on the utility room roof, I also noticed that the bird box I mounted last year actually fell off.

What a mess

I will see if I can find some replacement slate and fix it up, as apparently this is the type of place that Tree Bumblebees actually like to nest, even if the birds continue to ignore it.

If there are any updates, we’ll keep you posted here.

The Garden, Foraging and More

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I haven’t updated in a long time and where better to begin a new post, than the garden?

Not a lot has changed. We’ve filled up our ‘Kitchen Garden’ area now and I’ve make a little sign too (I will go into more detail in another post) and added a couple more decorative plants too.

The rhubarb planted earlier in the year has now reached a sort of monstrous climax in its growing. I can’t wait to pick it, but I have to, because we need to leave it alone for at least a year to let the crown establish, or two years if we can control ourselves. Hopefully, then the rhubarb will last a long time and be really productive.

Kitchen Garden in early summer

It’s not just the rhubarb, the whole kitchen garden has started to grow wildly out of control. The dill and fennel are just being ridiculous and all of the mint is greedily occupying any space it can find.  The rosemary has started to surpass the rather slow growing bay tree and the lemon verbena is just starting to show off. All the while the sage has died under the suffocating presence of the nasturtium and the rambunctious pineapple sage which we planted more recently has flourished.

I find this often happens to me. I get seeds or small plants and micromanage their first few months and once they start to establish I tend to leave them alone, then one day I’ll walk out of my door into a jungle.

Well, apart from my deceased sage plant, the only thing that isn’t having a good time is the thyme. It’s been a bit slow in growing and now it’s got hardly any light, not dead though, so that’s a plus.

We’ve planted some thorn-less blackberry plants and three new kinds of strawberries between the rhubarb and the herbs, and they’re all doing quite well.

I also have two rather nice pineberry plants out the back. Frustratingly I thought they’d died when I was growing them from seed, so I just tipped out the plant onto a patch that had been dug up and saved the pot. However a couple weeks later I noticed new growth on the plant and decided to put some compost around the roots. It’s done exceedingly well and I’ve had quite a few (albeit very teeny) pineberries, and they’re very tasty. I’ve been waiting for it to send out little creepers like the rest of my strawberries so I could pot it and move it into the kitchen garden. Alas, it has decided not to send any out. I’ll just have to order some seeds again in the new year.

Lupins, Geums, Delphiniums, Thistles, Lavender and our NEW(ish) DOOR (and windows)!  Early Summer

The weather has been a bit challenging for the other plants in my garden. The delphiniums were just snapped in half with the strong winds earlier in the year. The broken bits made it into a jug and lived for about a week in the house, which was nice. They grew back again, and I cut them back once they died and they came back again but haven’t really flowed as nicely.

The lupins have had an aphid problem this year (as did the nasturtium ). They put on a spectacular show at the beginning of the year though.  I have also added some ‘Totally Tangerine’ geums which set off the purple plants nicely, as well as a couple of violent magenta thistles which the bees love. Another new addition is the buddleja in ‘black knight’ in the front garden.  We’re hoping it’s going to grow well behind a wall and to block out the neighbours a little bit as well as attract a lot of butterflies.

Last weekend, we were excited to discover that a tree that overhangs into our garden is, in fact, Elder. I have to admit that I’ve never paid much attention to the creamy umbels before nor the black berries on it. Paul happened to notice them as we were cutting the grass recently and got just a little bit excited and marched outside with a couple of our plant books and a camera, and I picked off a leaf and used my ‘British Trees’ app to identify it.

Paul in particular is now excited thinking about all the things we could make: Elder-flower cordial,  elderberry and apple pie and the list goes on…

We both really enjoy foraging, or maybe the thought of foraging? As we very rarely do it, although we do have some literature on the subject.

We recently (in July) had a week long stay in Cornwall on holiday and a couple of weeks before we went, we saw The Lost Gardens of Heligan were hosting a foraging event ‘Wild Food Wild Walk; with Emma Gunn’ (from Never Mind the Burdocks) . The event was £20 each but also included entrance to the gardens which is ordinarily £14.50 each anyway. We booked it in advance, afraid that it would be overrun with people trying to go last minute, but we were in for a treat.

Garlic mustard pesto and pickled wild garlic seed pods with Honeysuckle cordial

We got there on the day only to discover it was just Paul and I on the tour with Emma.  It was a fantastic day, the tour lasted around 2 hours and at the end Emma brought out some food she’d made from foraged plants. There was gluten free Hogweed seed, cherry and almond cake, garlic mustard pesto and  pickled unripe Ramson seed pods as well as a honeysuckle cordial, all of it was delicious but in particular the wild garlic seed pods and the cordial. Unfortunately we were so preoccupied with stuffing our faces with cake, we didn’t get a picture.

We also made sure to buy both of her books in the Heligan gift shop before we left and eagerly await the next.

Some of things we ate include: Unripened Hazelnuts (which I actually prefer over ripe ones); Bamboo shoots; Day Lilies; Nettles; Hogweed seed; Navelwort; Primrose leaf; Garlic Mustard; Comfrey; Nectar of Fuchsias; Mallow flower; and Sorrel leaves. There were many other too but I can’t remember the names of a lot of them off the top of my head.

I’n the future I think we both want to have the confidence to experiment a little with foraged foods (whether from the garden or further afield). In particular, Paul is eager to learn to make different cordials – so that’s always a good place to start.

The Great Outdoors

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We’ve had a highly-concentrated flurry of work being done on the house. In the last couple of months, we’ve had more done than possibly the last year. Although this has been good for getting work done it means I haven’t had much of a chance to post an update in a while, but hopefully this will be the first of a few as I catch up.

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Firstly, we’ve had a lot of work going on in the gardens. We’ve finally had the fence in the back garden put up, so next door can’t just wander in (which their dog and children tended to do). And the wall at the back has been re-rendered on the bad parts, and since the weather has been so good recently, I even got round to pressure washing it and slapping on a few coats of paint.

Please excuse my sexy DIY clothes

Please excuse my sexy DIY clothes

We continue to prevail in our ongoing battle with the unrelenting tentacles of ivy which seem to be trying to drown every solid fixture in the garden – but the war continues.

I’ve painted the wall with Sandtex’s ‘Chalk Hill’ it’s a grey so light that’s almost white, but it’s a little less bland. It was a lighter colour than I thought it would be but I’m happy with it, and it’s certainly better than the semi-attempt at graffiti that was there.

We’re having more trouble on trying to decide what colour to paint the fence, however. I like the natural colour but am happy to paint the fence either a cream or grey or green (to match our new front door!) but Paul disagrees.

It’s not just the back garden that’s been getting all of the attention.

I’ve planted some delphiniums in place of where last year’s foxgloves were. One was completely chomped down by slugs overnight and has now been replaced by a new one I bought today (and now surrounded by slug pellets). I replaced one of the lupins that didn’t come back from last year. I’ve also put in a couple of anemones to fill two gaps beside the lupins. But the lavenders are still going strong for now.

A few months after we first moved in, Paul cut down all of the useless bushes along the long patch of soil running down the side of the house. Although it opened the area up, we didn’t do much more with it, until now. We pulled up all of the horrible stones that covered it and discovered that the previous occupants hadn’t bothered using proper ground sheets to stop weeds from coming up, but just used the bags that the stones had come in, and then filled in the gaps with reems of Sainsbury’s plastic bags (classy!).

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Once we’d removed all of that, we dug out the rotting roots, and have started to plan and even plant some new things. The whole raised area is reserved for edible plants. At the moment it’s mainly made up of a lot of herbs but we also planted  a couple of rhubarb plants in February at the shaded end, having successfully grown rhubarb at our old flat.

All of this garden work means we have learnt a few things, and one thing is that the soil is a bit rubbishy. We have a heavy clay soil which makes it really hard to dig down deep but is also very stoney – although we try to pick out all of the stones we encounter it’s made even more difficult by the fact the clay soil solidifies when it’s exposed to the air for too long. We also found that the the area between the old fence we tore down last year and the wall that we can now see, was used as a dumping ground by previous occupants, meaning we found some lovely items, including motorcycle parts, lighters, bottles and bags of retro food packaging. It’s a bit like Time Team, but it over covers a couple of decades, although Paul was quite good at identifying old sweet wrappers and bottles from the 90’s.

Downloads

We’ve taken many bags full of stones, bricks, and other crap to the local recycling centre, which they charge for, so it’s been an expensive clean up. But it’s considerably clearer now and today we bought six large bags of soil conditioner and have tried to cover and mix it with our front garden soil in the hopes it will improve the quality and make planting/growing things a lot easier. Fingers crossed. We’ve also ripped out even more of the plants and bushes that were just growing around the place. Thankfully the recycling centre don’t charge for this, because we have taken car-loads of the stuff recently, and although we have started using our beehive shaped composter, it’s already full just with grass cutting.

Despite all of these changes, our garden has been a bit bird crazy recently. We always try and have bird food out anyway, but in previous years the bits we’ve put out have been ignored by the local wildlife. But when we noticed a couple of birds that kept visiting us, we bought some more and then suddenly it’s escalated to flocks of sparrows, at least a couple of blue tits and a great tit, two black birds, a fat wood pigeon, and two magpies. we’ve been having to fill the feeder up every day with suet pellets and seeds (although looking at the floors around the feeder, they don’t seem to like black sunflower seeds, so they are probably getting through it so quickly just so they can get to the bits they actually like). We’ve since purchased a water feeder as well as several other little feeding areas for them all.

Today we’ve bought a sparrow bird house and Paul’s climbed on top of the utility roof to put it in a warm but protected area. We probably won’t see anything this year, but fingers cross for the coming years.