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Sally Nex

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Sally Nex

Category Archives: wildlife gardening

The October veg garden

02 Friday Oct 2020

Posted by sallynex in climate change, gardening without plastic, greenhouse, kitchen garden, my garden, seeds, self sufficiency, sustainability, this month in the garden, wildlife gardening

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

apple juice, apples, autumn, cloche, gardening without plastic, greenhouse, harvesting, juice, mice, newspaper pots, no dig, plant protection, sowing, tomatoes, windfall apples, winter salads

Life in the veg garden is taking on a definitely autumnal feel… it’s all fuzzy edges, like a woolly jumper


Harvesting this month:
French beans, carrots, the last of the courgettes and patty pan summer squash, Musquee de Provence winter squash, potatoes (maincrops to store), raspberries, curled-leaf and flat-leaf parsley, baby-leaf salads from pots outside the back door.

Sowing this month: Broad beans for overwintering, beetroot (for leaves), turnips (for leaves), spring onions, and round-rooted carrots.

This month I will be:

  • Clearing out the greenhouses
  • Pricking out greenhouse salad seedlings
  • Turning the compost
  • Mulching empty beds
  • Planting herbs and perennial vegetables
  • Juicing the last of the apples (mine and other people’s!)
  • Repairing fences

Mouse update

Remember my poor mouse-beheaded beetroot seedlings from last month?

The obvious solution was to trap the mice – and that’s certainly what I would have done before I became aware of the need for sustainability in the garden.

I don’t like killing things at the best of times: and with mice in particular they’re a really important food source for larger predators like owls, so every mouse that you trap is one removed from the wider ecosystem.

Also mouse traps are, usually, plastic, and I have vowed not to buy any new plastic for my garden (even if it’s not strictly for gardening).

The wildlife photographer Simon King once said to me that we humans are really, really clever animals: so if we can’t figure out a way to keep other animals away from our food without killing them, we’re not thinking hard enough.

Quite right: so I put my humanoid thinking cap on, and this is what I came up with.

I bought myself a big roll of 8mm gauge mesh from B&Q for about £20 and made myself a mesh cloche (the roll was big enough to make two or three, but one step at a time).

It took a while to get right: I had to staple the bottom edges to wooden battens, burying these in the ground to hold the whole thing stable and prevent mice from burrowing underneath, and the ends are squares of mesh tied in with wire, again buried a few inches beneath the ground.

But I resowed my beetroot seeds at the beginning of the month and they are already much bigger than they ever reached last month before the mice got them. It’s tricky to get in and weed, but I sow into mulch so the few weeds that have come up aren’t too troublesome. Once the seedlings have developed into sturdy young plants, of less interest to mice, I will remove the whole cloche and stash it to use elsewhere. It should last me several years of mouse-free sowing.

The big greenhouse clearout

That’s it: time to admit defeat. I had a good pick over of the last tomatoes to cook down and freeze, and now the plants are undeniably finished. They’ll go onto the compost heap (I had a spot of blight during the season where the rain got inside the greenhouse – but even blighted foliage can be composted as the disease doesn’t survive once the foliage breaks down).

Once the toms are out I’ll give the glass a good wash, then weed out the borders and refresh with a good thick (5cm/2″) mulch of garden compost before replanting with greenhouse salads (see below). My only dilemma is that I can’t bear to pull up those lovely French marigolds just yet; I sowed them back in February and they’ve been flowering their socks off all summer, no deadheading required. I guess the salads will just have to go in behind them till they’re done.

Pricking out salads

From this….
…to this: give them another few weeks and they’ll be the perfect size for planting into the greenhouse borders after the summer crops are cleared

All the salad plants I sowed last month are now big sturdy seedlings and ready to move on into their own individual newspaper pots (the above are Winter Density lettuce (left) and mizuna (right)).

I’m a big fan of newspaper pots: zero plastic and pretty much zero carbon (as you’re reusing waste newspaper to make them) and the seedlings do so much better as their roots grow through the sides and don’t circle as they would in plastic. I get much better results from them every year – well worth the extra 15 minutes it takes me to fill a seed tray with paper pots.

Juice!

The last of the windfalls: I have a lovely little Devonshire Quarrenden apple tree, very early eater with a lovely sweet, strawberry-like flavour. But my only slight problem is that it crops so early in the year – over by about mid-September most years – that I miss all the Apple Days and my windfalls are already long gone before I can juice them.

This year, what with the coronavirus an’ all, Apple Days aren’t really happening – or at least not the ones with the big community juicing events. Luckily, though, I’ve found a friend with access to a scratter, to chop up the windfalls into rough pieces, and a press, to make the juice.

I am taking along my own few remaining windfalls, and scavenging apples from everyone I can think of with a surplus. It’s one of the best ways I know of storing the abundance our apple trees provide: tip the juice into saved plastic litre bottles and freeze, then savour the rich, sweet flavour all through winter. Yum.

We are all scientists

26 Thursday Nov 2015

Posted by sallynex in education, wildlife gardening

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

citizen science, hedgerows, natural history museum, OPAL, wildlife

OVER-18s-GENERAL-WILDLIFE_Paul-Steven_dormouse-on-forsythia-taken-in-St-Ives-Cornwall

‘Dormouse on Forsythia’ by Paul Steven, St. Ives, Cornwall: winner, over 18s ‘General Wildlife’ category, OPAL Devon & Cornwall wildlife photography competition

Recently I found myself sitting cross-legged staring into my hedge.

I have particularly fine hedges. Good thing too as there are rather a lot of them: half a mile, to be exact.

They are ancient Somerset hedgerows and were old before I was even born. As is the way in these parts they’re built up on banks of churt flint and are mainly hazel: some are laid, but most are not, relying on the density of the species which grow in them to keep animals in and people out.

They are wildlife superhighways (as I know to my cost, having lost more just-sown broad bean seeds to the field mice in my hedgerows than I care to remember). You can tell how healthy your hedge is by counting the number of different species of plant in a three metre stretch, plus noting down evidence of animal activity (holes) and food (berries, nuts) as well as actual animals themselves (in my case, mainly snails, woodlice and centipedes).

My hedges got a silver award for structure (they’re getting a bit gappy here and there) and a gold for animal diversity and wildlife value. I felt quite proud.

In case you’re wondering what I’m on about, I was doing a biodiversity survey for OPAL (Open Air Laboratories), the citizen science project run by Imperial College London, the Natural History Museum, the Met Office, half a dozen other universities, and oh, loads of august institutions.

Its surveys have collected over 55,000 records of evidence collected by ordinary people like you and me, involving us in investigating the effects of everything from soil activity (worm-hunting) to water quality (ponds) and air quality (lichen – that was another one which had me peering at bits of my garden, this time the apple trees). There are now nearly 10 separate surveys, and anyone can join in: take a look and choose one you’d like to have a go at here.

They’re great fun, they get you looking at your garden in a whole different light, and what’s more you’re contributing to some really important research, feeding in to the great sea of knowledge from which ground-breaking insights occasionally pop up to influence governments, formulate solutions and generally change the way we think.

Citizen science is a fantastic way for scientists to gather huge quantities of information. The RSPB now has decades of detail about garden birds thanks to the Big Garden Birdwatch in January; the Big Butterfly Count in mid-summer is doing the same thing for butterflies; and the Ladybird Survey is keeping tabs on invasive alien harlequins via records of insects visiting people’s houses, sheds and gardens.

Isn’t it interesting that so many are garden-based? I’m sure it’s partly because that’s the outside space most of us have access to; but I suspect it’s also because gardeners are closet scientists by nature.

I don’t think of myself as much of a scientist; far too woolly of thought. But when it comes to plants and gardening I’ve taken science on board almost without realising it. I test my soil and know all about pH and geology; I can tell you the difference between xylem and phloem and wax lyrical on the ultra-violet patterns on foxglove flowers.

And I think that’s why I like doing OPAL surveys. I’ve become a scientist without noticing. Surprisingly, in the light of my almost overwhelmingly negative memories of science from school, it’s really interesting, too. Citizen science is taking off the lab coats, stripping out the inexplicable jargon and taking down the barriers dividing us into ‘artists’ or ‘scientists’. Turns out you don’t have to choose: it’s just about finding out about the world around you, after all. And it gives you a really good excuse to look at your garden for absolutely ages.

Wordless Wednesday

25 Wednesday Nov 2015

Posted by sallynex in wildlife gardening, wordless wednesday

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

dandelion heads, fire bugs, garden photography, photography, wordless wednesday

UNDER-18s-GENERAL-WILDIFE_Maddie-Leisham_Fire-bugs-taken-in-Brixham-Devon

‘Fire bugs’ by Maddie Leishman (aged 14) Brixham, Devon, winner of the Under 18s General Wildlife Category, OPAL Devon & Cornwall Wildlife Photography Competition. See more winning pics here

Flutter by and grab free seeds

03 Thursday Apr 2014

Posted by sallynex in wildlife gardening

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Tags

butterflies, Butterfly Conservation, special offers

butterfliesLast year was a good year for butterflies. I have the lace-doily cabbages to prove it.

I suspect this year might be a good one, too, fuelled by all the extra eggs all those multitudes of butterflies must have laid. I know I’ve already seen brimstones on the wing – unmistakeable with their buttercup-yellow colouring.

You might think we can all go back to worrying about the bees now, but there was a lot of ground to catch up on the butterfly front and we haven’t got there yet. So it’s still just as important as ever to cater for the prettier six-legged visitors in the garden (though they can still b****r off the cabbage patch).

You could start with this rather spiffy and very exclusive booklet from those nice people at Butterfly Conservation.

It’s on offer along with half-price membership for a limited period only and is all about how to attract butterflies to your garden. Plus it’s by the extremely knowledgeable Kate Bradbury which is all I need to mention, really. And as if that wasn’t enough there’s a free packet of seeds too if you’re among the first 100 people to take them up on the offer. You get pot luck from phlox, cornflowers or pot marigolds – all of which are very adorable if you happen to be a butterfly fluttering by.

All you need to do is go to their website, www.butterfly-conservation.org, and type in the code GARDEN50. The code is valid till the 30th April. Good luck!

**PS forgot to mention: the offer is valid only with direct debit membership applications.

 

This week in the garden: Going to sow a meadow

24 Monday Mar 2014

Posted by sallynex in cutting garden, garden design, my garden, wildlife gardening

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

annual mixes, annuals, flowers, meadows, Pictorial Meadows, wildflowers

meadow

This is my little meadow area at the top of the terraces. It doesn’t look very inspiring at the moment – there are some crocuses and hyacinths and a few old gold heritage daffodils on the way but I’ve only just begun to build up the bulbs quotient so a few years to go yet till it’s the sheet of spring colour I have in my head.

The sheet of summer colour it will become is very much a recent memory though: this is what it looked like last year:

meadow_2013

And from the other direction across to the lane…

meadow_2013b

I’m sowing the same mix – Pictorial Meadows short annual mix – and have tipped in a couple of packets of Ladybird poppies I got for free in magazines, just for fun.

Second year sowing isn’t quite as straightforward as the first year, when it was a matter of broadcast-sowing across a patch of virgin ground. Now I have bulbs to avoid, and a few weeds, and some self-seeders from last year’s meadow which I don’t want to disturb.

So I started by weeding out the dandelions, cleavers and creeping buttercup seedlings by hand. Then I divided the area up into four.

I weighed my seeds and divided that in four, too: you can also mix them with silver sand which means they’re a bit easier to handle and you can see where you’ve sown. I put each batch of seed into a teacup, then went out and dealt with just one quarter at a time.

My small-headed rake was perfect for raking in between other things, so very gingerly I raked up the topsoil to loosen it, then broadcast sowed as evenly as I could. Another light raking to mix them in with the top level of soil and you’re done.

Repeat for the other three quarters: the timing is also crucial. I’ve put off sowing this for a week now, as the weather has been so dry; yesterday, though, it rained, nicely damping the soil, and it’s forecast to rain again later today and tomorrow, then we’re in for a patch of showery but not too cold weather next week. Perfect for germinating seeds. Can’t wait to take the pics this summer: I still have passers by telling me how lovely my meadow was last year, and this year’s is going to be even better.

Where the wild things are

12 Tuesday Apr 2011

Posted by sallynex in wildlife gardening

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Nigel Dunnett

Ever since I saw the wonderful wildlife tower Nigel Dunnett built (with, no doubt, the aid of a small army of helpers) for his 2009 Chelsea show garden, Future Nature, I’ve had a bit of a thing for them. It’s not often, after all, that you come across something that’s useful in the garden, doesn’t cost a penny, yet – unlike most things with what might be called an allotment aesthetic – looks fabulous.

I came across this one at a spring open day held at the Magdalen Project, a sort of experimental eco-smallholding place just round the corner from where I live. It was tucked away at the back of a not particularly inspiring – mainly because it had only just been planted – forest garden. Though the jury is still out, for me, on forest gardens, I am totally sold on the whole idea of bug blocks, wildlife stacks, call them what you will.

It was made from old pallets, sawn in half and stacked: if you use full-width pallets you’ll only fill the outer six inches or so, therefore to save space you really only need the end bit (this also means you only need three pallets for a six-storey stack, if you get my drift, as you use the two halves on top of each other).

Then you just let your imagination rip to create as many little hidey-holes for bugs and beasties as you can. I loved the way they used roof tiles on the top stuffed with holey stones gathered from the beach.

Bits of old garden hose inside a flowerpot on its side….

…and these rather pretty old slates, interwoven with larger stones to create not only gaps for small things to crawl into (looks like this bit is a favourite with spiders) but also a range of textures and colour, part of what makes these things so pretty.

You can just about make out next door another flowerpot filled with hollow stems – the dried-out remains of cardoons, run-to-seed parsnips and carrots, or Queen Anne’s lace from the hedgerows are ideal.

Anything can be co-opted for use: here some old engineering bricks with bits of cane stuck into the holes. You could of course just leave the holes open: the canes just add a bit of quirkiness. The blocks which hold the pallets together have holes of varying sizes drilled into them, too.

And if you don’t like the whole pallets thing, there are other shapes and combinations you can use: here a tower of marine ply circles built up like a wedding cake on sturdy lengths of fencepost and topped with a bicycle tyre. Personally I prefer the ‘conventional’ pallet look: and whichever you choose, it’s a fantastic project to do with the kids on aimless school holiday weekdays.

There’s a very serious point to all this imagination and frippery: there are so many benefits of attracting insects to your garden. Pollinators – and pest-devouring creatures like beetles, frogs and toads – need every bit of help we can give them, thanks to our tendencies to throw pesticide cocktails around and remove every wildflower we can strip out of the countryside in favour of executive homes. By giving them somewhere safe to live, not only are you helping out your garden (especially if you grow veg), you’re doing your bit for biodiversity too.

I’ve already squirrelled away my first pallet (is there anything, I wonder, for which pallets are not useful?) and I can no longer pass a skip without having a quick peep inside just in case. I’ve even got the perfect spot for it: just below the window in what will, one day, be my fruit cage – a place where I need as many pollinators and pest-eaters as I can get. Time to get creative…

Hedging my bets #1

20 Thursday Jan 2011

Posted by sallynex in wildlife gardening

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

hedgerows, hedges, mixed hedges, surveys, wildlife hedges

I am feeling the heavy weight of responsibility on my shoulders.

You see, I have a proper hedgerow to look after. Actually, that’s about the understatement of the year: I have about half a mile of hedgerow, as it forms the entire border of my very long and very thin garden.

Hedgerow is a proper recognised wildlife habitat: it’s a priority habitat, in fact, protected under the Biodiversity Action Plan which describes them as ‘particularly important for biodiversity conservation’. About 130 vulnerable species (so rabbits don’t count) depend on them for their survival, including moths, birds, lichens and fungi.

Around here, there are miles and miles and miles of hedgerows. They are a wonderful, atmospheric feature of the landscape, turning lanes into green tunnels and patchworking the fields. They are, let’s remember, essentially man-made: the farmers around here have formed them over centuries, with traditional management techniques which are still, essentially, unchanged (although these days they use tractors and flails, not billhooks). If farmers didn’t manage hedgerows, they would disappear.

The OPAL project (it stands for Open Air Laboratories) is currently running a biodiversity survey which uses hedges to measure health of your local ecosystem. So I thought I’d put my own hedge to the test: you take a three-metre stretch of hedge and analyse the state of the hedge, its plant species, evidence of mammals living there, and any other creatures you find (mostly invertebrates like woodlice and snails).

I must admit mine was quite a cursory inspection: you’re supposed to do these things in groups, and record it on a proper form, which I’d forgotten to print out. But in my randomly-chosen three-metre stretch here’s what I found:


Plantlife:
Hart’s-tongue fern (Asplenium scolopendrium)
Herb robert (Geranium robertianum)
Queen Anne’s Lace (Daucus carota)
Brambles (Rubus fruticosus)


Ivy (Hedera helix)
Creeping buttercup (Ranunculus repens)
Nettles (Urtica dioica)

and I also happen to know (because they’re now starting to come up) there are also;
Snowdrops (Galanthus nivalis)
Cuckoo pint (Arum maculatum)

Other things:
Lichens, most of which I can’t identify
Mosses, ditto
Little yellow fungi, ditto
Bracket fungi on the rotten bits

Woody plants:
Elder (of which the above is the oldest example I’ve yet found in the hedge)(Sambucus nigra)
Hazel (lots) (Corylus avellana)
Blackthorn (Prunus spinosa)
Hawthorn (Crataegus monogyna)
Alder (Alnus glutinosa)

It’s also a sign of the health of my hedgerows that there is a good mix of dead wood and live: the live provides the fruits, berries etc while the dead wood is colonised by tunnelling insects and the like.

However the hazel is undeniably taking over: there is less blackthorn than I would like (though my poor prickled fingers don’t agree) and I could do with some more elder too.

Creatures:
I didn’t find much to look at since it was winter and very cold when I looked at my hedgerow, and most sensible things were tucked up warm and weren’t remotely interested in being surveyed.

However I did find this rather fine evidence of rabbits (as if I needed any proof: they scatter to right and left as you walk down the garden here). I have also, since I’ve been here, seen voles, mice, fox footprints and hundreds and hundreds of birds: wrens, sparrows, bluetits, wagtails, blackbirds, thrushes, robins, and that’s not counting the ones I couldn’t identify. And buzzards, and crows, and seagulls. though I don’t think they rely too heavily on the hedgerows for day-to-day sustenance.

You see? What a responsibility. But though I like wildlife as much as the next person, and have a sense of tradition and history, and a great love of the countryside: I must also garden. And my hedges are undeniably taking over my garden, to the point where there is little garden left. They are 8ft wide in places, for goodness’ sake.

My next step? What would you do?

Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home

23 Tuesday Nov 2010

Posted by sallynex in wildlife gardening

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

alien invaders, ladybirds

Has anyone else had ladybirds setting up home in odd corners this autumn?

We’ve had a veritable plague. They started appearing early last month, when I took this photo: they were crawling around on the windows, wandering over ceilings, popping up in cupboards. I was initially delighted as I thought, aaahh, dear little ladybirds, looking for somewhere to stay for the winter.

Actually I had no idea they hibernated: but yes, apparently they like all sorts of different hibernating spots. And spots is the word: the number of spots on a ladybird’s back determines where, and if, it will hibernate.

Seven-spots (the most common type) migrate; others mostly hibernate in hollow plant stems: but tree trunks, bushes and fence posts are other favoured spots. It’s mainly two-spots which seek out our houses. And they all hibernate in big groups – it makes finding a mate easier in spring. If all goes well they can live two to three years, apparently. That’s as long as our last pet hamster.

Sadly, though, there isn’t a two-spot to be seen in my little cluster of snoozy ladybirds. That’s because these are not our native ladybirds but the harlequins, the grey squirrels of the ladybird world. They’re from America, but they’re not nice cultured friendly amusing Americans: they’re very large, very successful and very competitive Americans. In fact they have a simple strategy in elbowing out our native ladybirds, which tend not to like to make too much of a fuss (am I overdoing the anthropomorphism here?): they simply eat them out of house, home and aphid colonies.

This leaves me with a dilemma. Obviously the reason we gardeners like ladybirds is because they eat aphids – and a ladybird with a monster appetite sounds like a serious asset to a harassed vegetable gardener. But at what cost?

I am recording my little colony on the UK-wide Harlequin Ladybird Survey (http://www.harlequin-survey.org/) which is tracking the spread of this possibly-not-entirely-unwelcome alien across the country. We are definitely on the fringes of its spread – but it’s definitely here and in some numbers.

But what do I do now? Kick this lot out of the corner of my dining room? Or live and let live? (this last does not apply to our local aphid colony next year, of course….)

There’s an elephant in my garden

03 Thursday Sep 2009

Posted by sallynex in wildlife gardening

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

caterpillars, Elephant Hawk Moth

Look what we found crawling across our lawn today.


Isn’t he extraordinary? He stayed just like this, reared up like some prehistoric mini-dinosaur, no doubt in an attempt to make us fear for our lives. He needn’t have worried – we certainly weren’t about to eat him.

Fortunately, given his size (about the thickness of my ring finger and almost as long) he’s not a garden pest. I discovered from the outstandingly good identification site UK Moths that he’s an Elephant Hawk Moth caterpillar, and eats rosebay willowherb – which, owing to the fact that I’m seriously behind on the weeding at the moment, I happen to have a patch of at the end of one of my borders. So off he went to feast on my weeds till he turns into a lovely big moth with pink-striped wings. Who knows – if he finds another big pink-winged moth I might I no longer have a willowherb problem. Now that would be a result.

School lessons

01 Wednesday Oct 2008

Posted by sallynex in pond, wildlife gardening

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

school garden, wildlife hedges

I mentioned some time ago that I’d taken over the school garden.

Well, in the way of these things, shortly after I took it on, they started building work which meant not only was everything on hold for more than a year, but also we lost half the garden before we’d even started.

You take these things on the chin, though, and in fact it’s all worked out OK in the end since now the work has finished, I know where we are and we can go forward. I got all inspired by the Dorset Cereals Edible Playground garden that won Hampton Court this year, and between me and various teachers and parents who should really know better, we’ve come up with a big and rather exciting scheme for developing a new space for the kids to grow lots of food in.

So before we started I thought I’d record what state it’s in at the moment – neglected in places, presentable-ish in others, but in need of a lot of work, hopefully from people large and small.

This is the wildlife pond – weedy, unkempt, and recently much larger. The bit on the other side of the picket fence is tarmac now, but it used to be garden. Never mind: there are plenty of bits left to have fun with, including a raised bed, a soon-to-be herb bed and a bog garden, as well as sundry weed-infested borders which once cleared will be open to inspiration.

This is the (somewhat neglected and overgrown) Millennium Garden – can you see why?

And these are the raised beds along the front of the school itself. Currently planted with a hotch-potch of different plants, and not in too bad a state, but one talented mum has now come up with a design involving box balls, a lot of alliums, some Geranium ‘Rozeanne’ and a few prostrate rosemaries, which will hopefully pull this lot together and make it look pretty good for most of the year. This is our first project – I’m going shopping next week if the PSA give me the green light.


Finally – the bit everyone’s getting excited about. All the kids in the school, from 4-year-olds in reception to the big girls and boys in Year 6, are being given a design project in which they’re going to be asked to come up with loads of imaginative designs, from which we’ll select as much inspiration as we can cram in without making it too overcrowded. From this we’ll create our Kitchen Garden. The hedge behind it (a mixed wildlife hedge around the pond) is coming down by about half, which is a huge job for November, but I’m trying not to think about that too much: instead looking forward to lots of colourful drawings and some seriously good ideas!

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