During this last week or so we have been having summer – temperatures up to 30C (86F), even in our rather chilly garden, almost unbroken sunshine and the watering can in constant use. It prompted the ants nesting in the greenhouse to take to the air one hot afternoon, to the delight of the birds: sparrows and blackbirds busily picking them up, and house martins and swifts swooping overhead for the higher-flying ones. A couple of enterprising sparrows positioned themselves on the garage guttering directly above the greenhouse roof vents to catch those that flew out that way. With the patio having been relaid, there are no longer any nests there for the birds to enjoy, but I’ve been putting out any others that I come across (there was a nest in one of the dahlia pots) to be dealt with by our avian visitors.
There have been a great many insects in the garden this year. Our bees, sadly, buzzed off, we don’t know why; they had seemed happy enough and we left a lot of the lawn uncut so that they could feed on the clover, but our beekeeper neighbour confirmed that they had deserted their nestbox. We’ve told him that we’d be happy to host another hive next year if he has one in need of a home. However there have been plenty of bumble- and other bees, hoverflies and the like, and we’d like to think that leaving so much grass to grow long has helped. (It’s now time to cut most of it down; there are ants’ nests appearing in the cowslip patch, and the blackbirds will be most appreciative if we expose them and let the lawn recover.) I’ve also left the parsley to grow tall, partly for the flowers which look good in arrangements of cut flowers, partly for the seeds and partly to keep the pollinators happy; at a distance they just look like a froth of yellowy-green flowers but, closer to, you see that all sorts of insect life is in there.
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| Parsley in flower |
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| Insect life on the parsley |
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| ... and a ladybird |
The ladybird is particularly welcome. I had the usual infestation of blackfly on my broad beans and on the leaf beet that is still in the veg patch from last year, flowering but still with a few edible leaves; however the ladybirds obligingly laid their eggs on those plants and the larvae cleaned up the beans completely and did a reasonable job on the spinach. I see that there is also a larva on one of my aubergine plants in the greenhouse, dealing most effectively with the greenfly.
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| Hungry ladybird larva on the aubergines |
Until a couple of weeks ago this had been a very poor year
for butterflies, but the heat has brought more of them out, especially the
whites, meadow browns and gatekeepers; there has been an occasional peacock, red
admiral and tortoiseshell, but very few. I'm hoping that more will turn up when the buddleja flowers, but a couple of weeks ago we had a very windy day which snapped a lot of the buddleja stems, so it's looking rather sorry for itself. One day I spotted a very small blue butterfly but am struggling to
identify it; the size suggested a Small Blue but it’s the wrong month, and the
other contenders (Chalkhill Blue, Silver-studded Blue, Brown Argus, etc) seem
to be too large or too early/late. It
was very pretty. There is no shortage of
cabbage whites, especially under the netting that I’ve put over the brassicas! –
there are a couple of very fine cabbages in there and I’d like to keep them caterpillar-free. The netting is also to deter the pigeons,
though if I took it off the bluetits might deal with the caterpillars, so it’s
a tricky trade-off.
There are plenty of little bluetits and wrens around, and
still a few baby sparrows being fed. One
day I left the back door open while I went outside to sow some seeds and, when
I came back in, there was a baby wren in the dining room trying to get out of
the (locked) patio doors. It tried to
hide behind the curtains, but I managed to scoop it up in a bundle of garden
fleece and took it outside; I was a little bemused when it didn’t fly out of the
fleece, but I found it clinging desperately to the hem of my T-shirt, most
reluctant to let go. Eventually it took
off in search of mum; I hope it recovered quickly!
