New House… New Garden…New Years Resolutions

So since I last posted here (a loooong time ago; I have been very slack) I have moved house….

I’m missing my sparrows, wagtails, frogs, sparrowhawk etc… but this garden has some

different visitors that make up for it..

A young slow worm

 

 

 

 

The best part is there is large allotment patch at the back although it had not been looked after for some time. I attempted to dig part of it over last year, and I managed to plant some pumpkins out, resulting in yummy pumpkin cake and pumpkin pie.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But my new years resolution is to do so much more in the garden this year… I’ve got some interesting seeds from James Wong and Clare has got me a tin bath to create a pond like at my old house 🙂 I’ll keep you posted!

DIY Hogitat!

Well, it’s not a hogitat actually… it’s a hedgehog feeding station! After acquiring some dried hedgehog food from freecycle I decided to convert one of my big plastic plant pots into an area where hedgehogs can eat in peace and the pesky ginger cat can’t get to it, as he is fat enough! Hope the hedgehogs like!

Grow Your Own Garden

Still got lots of veggies and fruit growing in the garden. The birds are so lazy they don’t eat the seeds from the sunflowers but wait for me to remove them and put them on the bird table. Looking forward to trying my tasty peppers… 🙂

Ribbit!

The frogs in the garden still do not like the pond I have created for them! This little fellow has decided he prefers the birdbath!

Shield bugs galore!

All kinds of shield bugs seem to love my sunflowers. There are two sloe bugs which I have been able to spot on my 2 big sunflowers nearly every day for a couple of weeks now. You can tell them from other shield bugs because if you look closely they have a layer of fine hairs. Since they seem to have taken residence we have managed to get some nice shots of them.

It was while I was looking at these sloe bugs that I heard a very loud insect flying past me, which landed and turned out to be a forest bug. It was the largest shield bug I have ever seen and had really big ‘shoulder pads’ like an American football player. I don’t know if these are what makes it so loud when it flies!

There have also been a few younger green shield bugs around the sunflowers too. No piccies yet… 🙂

On another note, it was while researching these shield bugs that i discovered that many people, including one of my sister’s friends, call these ‘stink bugs’ because of the “pungent fluid exuded when the insects become alarmed” (according to my Collins Insect Guide!). We had never heard of this before and certainly never experienced any stinking from these bugs!

Sparrowhawk in the garden!

I suppose I should have expected it to happen sooner or later, seeing as the garden is now attracting up to 50 or more sparrows at a time – quite a delight to watch! Today, I was completely taken by surprise by a sparrowhawk landing on the bird table. It moved to the fence, but by the time I got the camera it decided to fly away – always the way! I think it may have been around earlier too, as I heard the sparrows panicking  and one flew into the patio window and stunned herself. I took her in and put her in a cardboard box lined with a cloth for 10 minutes as she wasn’t quite with it and luckily she was right as rain afterwards.

Last night discovered our most successful moth trap so far. Known as the ‘living room’ – all you have to do is leave the doors open and turn the light on :p It was really hot and we kept the door open a little too late into the night. Attracted rather a lot of orange swifts. I really hope to do a proper moth trap soon – I say proper, but I think we’ll just start out with the good old white cloth and torch technique, and perhaps look into making our own soon. Also keeping an eye out on eBay, but I think buying one takes all the fun and achievement out of building your own… we will see!

Cat and Moth

I was sitting watching TV tonight when I noticed a black cat that regularly visits the garden darting back and forth past the patio window. He is usually very shy so I became curious when it seemed that this time he was too preoccupied with something to be bothered by me. Eventually he wandered off half-heartedly and I looked outside to find a moth on the floor. The poor thing seemed intact and flew off quite happily after posing for a few photos. I’ll put some up later if any were good. After checking online, i discovered the little guy was a Scalloped Oak Crocallis elinguaria.

In other news, I’ve put up some bird feeders with peanuts, which has seemed to attract the sparrows back to the garden after they fled during all the building work next door. I thought they would take a while to get used to the new feeders but they were tucking in within an hour of me putting them up 🙂

Some pics!

A couple of Pyrausta aurata moths that seem to love my oregano plants at the moment. Had seen lots of posts on Wild About Britian about them and thought they were really pretty, then suddenly spotted them in my garden and have taken about a million photos now! They can be mistaken for Pyrausta purpuralis.

Another one 🙂

A small copper butterfly in the park

A common blue butterfly in the park (alongside convienient ladybird 🙂 )

As yet unidentified caterpillar. Looks like a geometrid? – also called inchworms or loopers, named because of the way they move, appearing to measure the earth (the word geometrid means earth-measurer in Greek).

Plant Families

I have started to take much more notice of plants lately, especially edible ones, after discovering garlic mustard last year. It is really easy to spot and delicious in salads.

As a complete noob, I usually look up each plant individually by using a Reader’s Digest book that narrows it down by flower colour and number of petals, or checking online.

I recently came across this website, which gives a different perspective to identifying plants – the “patterns approach”. I ‘d already learned from investigating garlic mustard that all species in its family Cruciferae are edible, but this guide teaches you their characteristics so that you can identify plants in the family easily. Although he is based in the US, the characteristics of the plant families he outlines are applicable anywhere. The illustrations are great and its fun to discover really new and simple things like how a clover actually has lots of tiny Pea flowers.

If you’re interested in foraging for edible plants, I’d recommend the book “Seaweed And Eat It” by Fiona Houston and Xa Milne, which I won in a competition totally by chance, but I’m pretty glad I did. In black and white and with only one small picture of each plant, it is not so great for identifying plants, but it gives you an idea of what the most common things to look for are, so you know what to check for in a guide-book, and has many simple recipe ideas to use them in.

Out and About

So here are some things I have seen lately in the field by my house…

This is the caterpillar of a knotgrass moth (Acronicta rumicis). It is distinguished from other similar ones by the red and brick coloured triangular patches, which are below its spiracles.

Well, spiracle is a new word for me, so for anybody else who doesn’t know it, here’s the definition: the breathing pores through which insects obtain their air supply. They occur on most segments of the body and lead to the tracheal system.

I can just about spot them on this caterpillar.

They also have white blotches on each side and red spots along the back. They feed on herbaceous plants: docks, plantain, bramble.

Speaking of dock, we also spotted this little fellow (or should I say lady, as this is the female) Gastrophysa viridula, a green beetle that feeds on dock and is sometimes known as a green dock leaf beetle. Mated females become grossly distended so that their elytra do not fully cover the abdomen.