One year on the wildlife plot

September marks a year on the wildlife plot. I can't quite believe it. I have to say it has been an absolute pleasure working on it and now that I know the garden a bit better, I am more able to see what I need to do. 

There have been so many benefits to looking after this plot, not least the number of people that stop to talk and I have to say a massive thank you to everyone who has donated a plant or two to the plot. I have had everything from trees to bulbs and rarely, if ever, say no.

The other great benefit for me is that I have had to start learning the names of butterflies, moths and caterpillars and whilst I am not great at it, I am getting better.

As September is the start of the year for the plot, I thought I would talk about some of the things that I would like to do over the coming year just in case anyone thought they would love to join in and help with any of the tasks. ;-)

Joy Simpson

Saving leek seeds

The very last of my seeds that I have been waiting for are the leeks. They seem to have taken ages and there appears to be more than one way of  producing new leeks.

Joy Simpson

5 uses for wood chips

I love it when there are free resources and you can make good use of them on your plots so here are my top 5 uses for wood chips.

  1. Use wood chips for paths. In fact a lot of us have already done this and it works well. It keeps the soil damp and plant roots from the beds can move into it and gain moisture. If I am making a new path I tend to put cardboard down first, water it (this helps the cardboard to break down) and then put the chippings on top of this. The cardboard prevents the weeds breaking through and saves having to scrabble through the chippings to weed. On paths which have been down for a while, the chippings need topping up depending on how thickly you used them.  If they have been down for at least a year, I tend to flick them onto the nearest bed as they will have composted or I scoop them up and put them in the compost bin and put new chippings down. You could, however, just put more chippings on top of the old ones.
  2. Build a heap on your plot and compost them. This can be as simple as a pile or you can put them in some sort of container - pallets, dalek bins etc, and leave them for at least a year. I had two bins full of wood chips and had to move them. They had been there for about 4 months and already they had started to break down. After a year you could put them in your compost heap in layers with green stuff, use them on paths or as a mulch for raspberries after putting a bit of compost down first. Wood chips make a fungally active compost and this is good for perennial fruit and veg.
  3. Build a Johnson-Su bioreactor - a very fancy name for a wood chip pile with  worms added to help the break down and in theory speed up the process. There is a bit more to this pile - it needs air holes so that all chippings are no more than 20-25cm away from air. This video explains it much more clearly.

If, however, this all seems a bit complicated, how about a much simpler method created in this video.

4.  Use the chips as a mulch but there are ways of doing this to make it successful. This way of gardening is called ' Back to Eden' First you need 7-10cm of compost then wood chips which have been composted for at least a year topped off with very well composted cow or chicken manure. After this, the composted wood chips are topped up each year or when necessary.

5. Use a wood chip pile to heat water! You need a very large pile of wood chips for this. As you build the pile, you coil a hose pipe attached to a cold water tap. Once the pile of chips has heated up - several days - run the water until it comes out of the pipe and then turn it off. Leave for a day and then to use the hot water, run the tap again and warm/hot water will come out until it runs cold and then turn it off.  There are camp sites which use this method of heating water for showers.

 

Joy Simpson

What can you see on the plot in July?

There is quite a lot to see on the plot this month as the weather warms up and the sun comes out. It may even mean we see fewer slugs and snails! 

Picking raspberries in the evening of the 13th of July, this small moth landed on one of my containers. I think it is a Clouded Silver, possibly male because it is quite clouded. It is a very small moth and hung around for ages.

The caterpillar food is hawthorn, blackthorn and cherry all of which we have a lot of in the wildlife garden.

On July 12th there were three Common Blue Damselflies hovering and flitting around the pond. They are electric blue and every now and then they settled on the leaves of the water lilies just long enough for me to take a photograph.

The British Dragonfly Society's identification site is very good. Originally I thought this was a dragonfly but when resting its wings fold back together and its eyes are separated on its head making it a damselfly.

One of the nursery schools that visit the garden released some tadpoles into the pond earlier on in the year only for the children to see these 'shrimp-like things' start to eat the tadpoles straight away. I suspect that the shrimp-like things were the larval stage of the damselfly as they will eat anything living that is smaller than themselves.

On the 1st of July a Cinnabar moth floated by me. They are very distinctive and therefore easy to identify. The caterpillars are the orange and black stripey ones that feed and crawl all over groundsel and Ragwort. Some of their habitats are sand dunes and heathland so it isn't surprising that we have them on the allotments.

I have been watching this anthill being built for several weeks now and I don't think it will be long before the ants fly. This is a black ant nest and when I disturbed it a bit, I saw wings. It is quite amazing that the ants all fly on the same day. It is opposite the pond behind the Alchemilla mollis.

The winged ants are both male and female and fly to mate. Unfortunately, the males die after mating and the females lose their wings and set off to establish their own nest.  However, this only happens if they are not eaten by the seagulls that circle round and round scooping them up.

 

 

 

 

Joy Simpson

Wildlife plot - cherry bed

One of the first jobs I did on the wildlife plot was to remove the raspberries from the bed at the side backing onto the outdoor area of Gorfin Hall. They had run halfway across the plot and I just don't have the time to keep something like that under control. So, out they came and in went a sour cherry donated to the plot. I wasn't sure what to do with the bed so left it partly covered in plastic and  grass and leaves to reduce the bindweed and waited for inspiration to occur. Sometimes it can take a long time!

Last week I read an article in Gardeners' World magazine by Rosi Rollings who has identified her top 12 plants for bees. Rosi has a nursery and undertakes research into the plants that bees like best alongside Dave Goulson a professor at Sussex University. For the magazine article Rosi planted reported on her six year  research counting the number of bees per square metre on each plant and sharing with us which plants had the highest number of bees over time.

In the cherry tree bed, I am going to plant from the list that Rosi recommends as I have some of these plants in my garden and I can grow others from seed or get cuttings and divisions from friends.

Read on to find the 3 best plants to use if you are short of space and see all 12 if you have a bigger area.

 

Joy Simpson

The wildlife plot in June - beware!

I have had to make a lot of decisions about the wildlife plot since September. Coppice all the hazels or just a few? I coppiced them all.  Leave the Allium triquetrium to spread or remove it? REMOVE IT! Prune the cooking apple tree all over or just half and do it over two years? I pruned it all over. So, I am used to making decisions and probably what made these easier is that what ever I decided, it wouldn't have much of an impact on anyone else apart from the Alliums.

Today, I had to make one of those more difficult decisions about some wildlife rather than plants.

Joy Simpson

Seed saving No. 4 - beetroot and leeks

Finally, some of the biennial crops are starting to develop seed; beetroot and leeks in particular.  It feels like a long time ago that I sowed this seed - about 14 months and they finish off my first year of seed saving. Charles Dowding shared an interesting post on instagram about Boltardy beetroot from Kings.

Joy Simpson

The wildlife garden May/June

I am not quite sure where April and May went but they do seem to have passed me by. However, I have been busy as have the bees on the phacelia.

This is a buff-tailed bumble bee - it might be a worker because it has a white tail with a buff-coloured stripe at the start of the white.

These bees can be found in many countries because they are used as pollinators in glasshouses. In fact, there are places where it is no longer legal to import them such as Australia as they compete with native bees.

In this post you can read about camouflaging spiders, the best shrubs for pollinators and the flowers that are coming out now on the plot.

Joy Simpson

Saving seed update 2

Dahlia Bright Eyes
                                                                 Dahlia seedlings

 

Like everyone I am sure, my windowsills and green house are full to brim with seedlings that are almost ready to go out when this cold spell stops. What I want to do is share some of the seedlings grown from seeds that I collected at the end of last year. Most seed companies do a germination percentage check to ensure that the seed they have will germinate so I wasn't sure whether mine would.

The first saved seeds that I have sown are from the dahlia 'Bright Eyes'. It is a single flower so accessible to bees and other insects. The normal way to create more dahlias is to take cuttings when they start to sprout but I thought I would try seeds. I have no idea whether they will come true so it is a wait and see job.

If you would like some of these seeds, you can reach me via the saving seeds blog. You will need to log in to see the comments and who has what seed.

Joy Simpson

The wildlife garden in March

All of the sun that we have had in the last few days has meant that the wildlife has started to emerge in the wildlife garden and because I am not very good at naming insects, I am focusing on trying to identify one bit of wildlife each time I visit. About 10 days ago I saw and managed to photograph this bee; Bombus lapadarius or Red-tailed bumble bee.

Joy Simpson

More Articles ...

  1. 10 things I didn't know about soil
  2. Rooting for Potatoes
  3. Different ways to compost
  4. The wildlife plot in November
  5. October on the wildlife plot

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