Earthstar

14 October 2024

We are organic, no-dig gardeners.

We apply our own home made organic compost to the soil surface. This means that our soil is rarely contaminated by pesticides or herbicides, giving invertebrates, soil bacteria and fungus the best opportunity to thrive. If these are thriving beneath the warm cover of compost, the plants will too.

We also store a lot of rainwater and so, when we water there are less pollutants added to the soil than if we used tap water.

We don’t dig the soil. This allows worms to burrow and fertilise the soil. The other beneficial invertebrates are also unimpeded. Bacteria and soil mycology too can prosper.

Evidence if you need it was seen this week when we discovered striate earthstar (Geastrum striatum) as we cleared where squash, pumpkins and tomatoes had been growing.

This is a rare fungus although with a wide range in England.

If we’d been digging , the strands of soil mycelia would have been broken and the striate earthstar  would probably not have grown. We don’t dig, so the earthstars get the chance to thrive.

Top marks to the head gardener who discovered the earthstar.

Waxcaps

13 October 2024

In the orchard windfalls lie thick and largely neglected. A skittish comma was attracted. And a big hornet came down to munch, unhappy with the company of flies. A poor return for the quantity of fruit on offer.

The orchard grass hides tiny yellow jewels.

Butter waxcaps (Hygrocybe ceracea). Not uncommon but as with most of our national fungi family they are depressingly in retreat. Modern management of grasslands typically sees them fertilised, herbicide & pesticide sprayed, overgrazed or overmown.

Butter waxcaps thrive in unimproved grassland and are connected by a network of underground fungal strands. Disturbing the soil breaks the connections. Fertiliser increases competition from grasses. Herbicides & pesticides permeate the soil reducing the vigour of fungi. Over-grazed or over-mown grasslands prevent the fruiting bodies emerging. Harrowing of grassland can also be destructive of delicate soil surface structures.

It is perhaps no coincidence that our waxcaps are in close proximity to the growing mounds of yellow meadow ants who also thrive in undisturbed grassland.

Locally we have/had a regionally important waxcap population thriving in an unimproved pasture within Bestwood Country Park whose management was annual grazing by sheep. The pasture was remarkable too in these days for being chock-full of the mounded nests of yellow meadow ants.

We fear the loss of these Bestwood waxcaps since Severn Trent drove a new water main through the pasture. We lack respect or understanding of the complexity and richness of life in our soil.

It is easy for us to form an emotional attachment to iconic mammals or birds and invest in their protection or reintroduction. This is not wrong.

It is a great pity that we so easily overlook the treasures of nature at our feet and give such little importance to the soil that nourishes and protects the planet.

Aurora

11 October 2024

Last night the aurora in the clear cloudless sky. I’ve waited a whole life for this. An awe-inspiring mystery skydance of pinks and reds and greens.

Others have photos that do the phenomenon justice.

Pheasant poults have been released over the hedge. Non-native, unlicensed and released across the country in their millions. Native species reintroduction programmes remain mired in beaurocracy.  

Wrens, busy, now sing loudly in the garden. Have their numbers been boosted by continental migrants?

Today a juvenile rat acrobatically in the bird feeders. A cloudless sky again and a raven cronking overhead. Garden work for us. Weeding and tidying. Topiarising. Mindful. Satisfying. Tiring.

In the vegetable garden, a common carder bee resting on a dahlia flower in the sun, sipping nectar with her long proboscis. Taking time. These are her final days - it is only the queens that overwinter.

Moving forward…

4 October 2024

A garden can’t stand still.

It’s either moving forward or going backwards.

And here’s the chance to work with number one son…

First to turn the stack of stored pine logs into something more interesting …

…. and to create a semi-circle of logs in our own form of woodhenge.

The logs will add to our stock of standing deadwood, contributing to soil mycology and invertebrate populations.

The head gardener will decide on the planting.

I intend to put in a small pond behind this area.

Next to hang a small five-bar gate and create a garden feature …

I bought the gate on an auction site and it’s sat, waiting patiently for me since then. Good gate! Sit! Stay!

But it’s eventually worked its way up to the top of the list.

The gate will allow us to close off access to this part of the Cedar Walk if necessary and may hopefully be something for small people to swing on.

Then finally to put a humungously heavy kestrel box in our big

sycamore.

The box is part of the biodiversity grant awarded by Severn Trent as mitigation for their local water main works. 

We sited a kestrel box within our garage gable and, although always getting interest from our local male kestrel, he’s never persuaded his mate to nest. Perhaps it’s the north facing aspect of the entrance? Or the disturbance from our neighbours Jack Russell..0

Let’s hope the new box is more tempting. The new gate will be able to exclude visitors and limit disturbance if we are successful.

Has nature lost the war…?

Grim.

Ours is the most nature-depleted country in Europe. We’ve lost 98% of our meadows. What scraps of land that remain for nature are so fragmented that populations no longer connect.

Pesticides now being used in the UK are more toxic than ever and more toxic than allowed to be used in the EU. Ten thousand times more toxic than DDT.

Climate change is leading to both wetter weather but also a hotter world. The extreme heat of 2019 was devastating for

many invertebrates. Their populations were still recovering when the wet and cool spring of 2024 hit.

Nature is paying the price.

Professor Dave Goulson reminds us that we have been losing 1-2% of our invertebrates each year since WWII. In eighty years that adds up to a staggering loss.

Butterfly Conservation tell us that 2024 is the worst on record for butterflies.

The Bumblebee Conservation Trust report the worst-ever year for bumblebees.

The writer Kate Bradbury has found a high proportion of hedgehogs are suffering from malnutrition. We’ve had one record of a hedgehog here this year.

And in the face of this our government chooses to

spend a staggering £22 billion on a carbon capture technology that at best has no proof of working and at worst will increase greenhouse gas emissions.

Man is at war with Nature. And if he wins he loses. Hubert Reeves

Then. Amongst the grim, our little granddaughter (4) is elected an eco councillor at her school. 

Perhaps there is hope.

Poignant

29 September 2024

Another of those poignant days..

Mum and dad moved in with us in 2016 after dad had fallen, incurring what became life-changing injuries. He had dementia by then. Along with mum we cared for dad until his dementia was judged ‘advanced’ and he had to move into care where he passed away. Almost immediately mums dementia became an issue until she was detained under the Mental Capacity Act and she moved into care in June of this year.

Dementia is a terminal disease. Unlike most other terminal illnesses, once you have a diagnosis, there is no treatment. No palliative care. The sufferer and the carers are on their own. Our social services teams are not resourced to
support families like ours.

It is a statement of the blindingly-obvious that being a carer turns your life upside down. It affects every thought and action. My sister and her husband shared the caring. Truth be told that it is the daughter who does the heavy lifting at these times. This was certainly true in our case. And even when shared, caring is 24/7/365. Relentless. Wearying. Unremitting in its demands. 

It won’t be surprising to know that it takes months to readjust after the full-time caring role ends. It’s possibly only on days like today that one reflects on this.

Today we chose to have breakfast a bit later. Just toast. Then coffee. We had slept without an ear cocked. 

Jill went out to plant bulb pots. I rounded shrubs and mounded leaves. I wasn’t alert for calls.

We defrosted soup for two and had it when we were ready. Then sat.

Onto planting bulbs in the orchard before teetering on a ladder picking apples. Clearing hay. Picking a big box of deliciously sweet Greensleeves apples. No time pressure. Finish when you finish.

No plan for when or what we were to have for evening meal…

We had, in rota with my sister and her husband spent alternate evenings with mum. Our evenings have now been given back to us.

The loss of a loved one is still raw. Mum is not gone. We visit regularly. She is frequently cross, distressed, confused, disorientated. Occasionally not unhappy.

But now that we know she is safe and being cared for, we can, once again, experience days like this..

Sparrowhawk

30 September 2024

Rain all day.

A juvenile sparrowhawk seen twice, drawn by the bird feeders.

Small and slight. Presumably a male. A superb bird.

On the second occasion it sat for almost an hour, preening and taking a keen interest in a woodpigeon feeding on clover at its feet.

Both flew away.

Apple harvest begins ..

27 September 2024

The apple trees are now hanging heavily with fruit.

We reclaimed the orchard in 2011 as, over a long seven months we removed  decades of choking undergrowth that had completely hidden the trees.

The orchard had

been planted in the years following WWII by the Polish airforce personnel who moved onto the site after the war. Lane’s Prince Albert, Cox’s Orange Pippins, Bramley’s. Our six apple trees were part of a bigger fruit tree orchard that included the remains of cherry trees - and we’re keen to preserve what is left. Orchards are being rapidly lost. They provide unique habitats for invertebrates and the birds and mammals that predate on them.

After our clearance, the trees slowly recovered from their incarceration. We helped them by following the tenets of old orchard practice and pruning by removing one branch a year to remove cross-crossing and diseased branches.

We also transplanted our apple codons from the allotment to provide a boundary ‘hedge’. Mostly desert apples.

One of our largest original orchard trees died a few years back. We’ve left it as standing deadwood to benefit invertebrates…. and, in my dreams, stag beetles and passing lesser spotted woodpeckers.

The trees will never achieve the goblet shape of classic apple trees but, in good years, they’re fruiting productively.

2022 was a bumper year, providing stored apples into May of the following year. 2023 was a void year due to late frosts but in 2024 the exceptionally wet spring and lack of frosts have resulted in plentiful crops.

I’ve begun the harvest and will store the apples in paper-lined reclaimed bread trays.

Windfalls will lie beneath the trees for invertebrates including ants, butterflies, wasps and hornets .. and to benefit over-wintering thrushes.

All an absolute privilege.