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Bumble Bee Conservation Trust
I have so many bumblebees in my garden that it seems hard to believe they are also on the endangered list. I had not realised how many different varieties of bumblebee there were and it has become something of a fascination to try and recognise the different types.
I have been taking the BBCT e-newsletter for some time but I decided to join and get more involved. The joining pack has a lovely poster for identification.
Now I just need the bees to sit still long enough so that I can see who has a buff tail, who has a white, and how wide are the yellow stripes, and are they a gold yellow or a bright yellow…
This may take some time!
Ethical Living
For my recent jolly into the subject of Ethics: Ethics – Further Thoughts
Posted in Ethical Living
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Bee Visitors
I started taking photos of the flowers but very soon got fascinated in the wide variety of bees that visited them. In the end, a flower without a bee visitor looked incomplete:>)
I don’t feel confident enough to name the bees but the flowers from top left to right: Scabious, Chive, Chive, Poppy, Marjoram, Buttercup, Marjoram, Knapweed, Red Clover
Posted in Photography
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Afternoon with the Heap
Marvellous day for putting a wash on the line – or it would have been if I’d remembered to get the washing out of the machine earlier! Still, it’s nearly dry.
I spent the afternoon sifting and shredding. Now all the old compost has been sifted ready for potting up next year and all the sticks and twigs that have been drying out have been shredded and layered between a sandwich of horse manure and bunny poo mix. I hope this will heat it up enough to break down the twiggy bits. On top of this are all the bits that didn’t make it through the seive.
When I had pulled out all of the drying twigs I had an unexpected bonus of more sifting work. The woodlice and beetle population had been at work and started to break down the wood. With this and overflow from the next compost I was able to sift out another bag of compost. Fantastic!
Even better, everything was packed away and covered over, and the washing bought in just before the rain started:>)
Cucumber
Spiced Pickled Cucumber
I tried cucumbers this year and bought a couple of plants at South Heath Garden Centre said to be ‘All Female’. I wondered if I was supposed to buy an ‘all male’ to go with them but, it seems not. They just went ahead a grew cucumbers, masses of them. So much so that I decided to try my hand a pickling. We shall see…
Butterfly Visitors
From top left to right: Brown Argus, Comma, Mrs Common Blue, Mr Common Blue, Gatekeeper, Skipper
We have many more but capturing them on camera has eluded me thus far: Brimstone; Red Admiral; Peacock; Marbled White, Large White, Chalk Hill Blue
Moths too: Pale Tussock, Vapourer, Burnett, Cinnabar (I keep my Ragwort specially:), and probably the most exciting for me, the Hummingbird Hawk Moth.
Posted in Photography
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Of Compost and Rats
I have been enjoying my compost, feeling it heat up with the horse manure, feeling that energy at work. Having moved here last year, Bobbie build me a wonderful compost area out of palletts. I have been sifting what remain of last years efforts and it is wonderful to have a bag full of the stuff made from your own waste material, all recycled with a lot of help from worms.
Unfortunately, the making of it attracted attention of the local rat population and, it seems the local cats were not able to keep of top of them – though I saw several trying. So, yesterday, I had to call in the Rat Man. I have had to stop feeding the birds and stop adding kitchen waste to my compost. Everything to starve the rats into eating the ‘special food’ tucked away in four black boxes around the garden. I’m a ‘live and let live’ kind of person and this hurts. But, there are just too many of them. Maybe, if I had ten cats…
I have assurances that the rats start feeling ill and return home to die. The toxins build up slowly in them and, if any were to be caught, the rat meal would only make the catcher feel a bit sick and it will pass. So long as they don’t have a diet consisting only of half dead rat, they will be OK… Maybe I should get ten cats…
Wild Flowers in the Garden
From top left to right: Aquilegia, Broom, Cornflower, Geranium, Love-in-the-Mist, Mallow, Oxeye Daisy, Scabious, Wild Rose
Posted in Photography
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Lughnasadh
Last Sunday, I was celebrating Lughnasadh on a sunny hillside overlooking the Uffington White Horse. I had been given a strawberry and asked the question “What is your harvest?” Lughnasadh is the time of the first harvest, the grain, and so it is in our own lives and time of reaping what we dowed earlier in the year.
But I had no words. What was my harvest? Life this year had been so strange. In February, I contracted a condition which left me unable to work and sapped all energy both from mind and body. Post Viral Fatigue they labeled it. Recovery has been steady, but very very slow. To talk of a harvest seemed so remote. But a harvest had come, I have taken a year out of work in order to get well. So what am I to do with it?
Today, I picked up my latest copy of Permaculture magazine. Positively beaming at me from the pages was an advert for an online course with Permaculture Visions. I signed up.