This article says it all! Maximise every millimetre of growing/ life space in your garden and make friends with the world!
Month: May 2018
A Billion brains.
This weekend we were walking in the Jura, high up enough to be above the line of flowering grasses and therefore cool and comfortable. The flowers were wonderful: purple columbines and strange parasitic yellow broomrapes; odd winged broom pushing up amongst the grass and in the shade of the trees, long spurred butterfly orchids and sturdy white helebores with egg yolk yellow centres, and everywhere there were ants!
The ground was alive with them and every track was a motorway of dark bodies. We found a huge wood ant nest and the surface was crackling with ants. I wondered if this was part of one of the famous super colonies of wood ants that have been studied a little further south in the Swiss Jura. It has been observed that each huge wood ant nest is actually linked to the next nest by tunnels and by lines of kinship. Theses ant cities work together and do not fight each other, creating peaceful and enormously sucessful empires of billions of animal living in harmony.
Not all wood ants live like this, but the colonies in the Jura have been proven to be different. They do not waste energy on fighting their own species, but instead tolerate each other and work together to hunt and forage.
They are hunters of other insects, but one of the bettles they never kill is the rose chafer beetle that was in my last post. If they encounter one of these they push it into the ant hill where it lays its eggs in saftey. These grow into larvea that spend a couple of years with the ants eating the pests that appear in the nest and thus keeping things clean for their hosts, before pupating and flying away.
When humans seem impossible, it would seem that the wise thing to do is to contemplate the even wiser ants!
click here for the useful rose rose beetle.
The Best things in Life are free ….
Living like an eastern potentate, this bejeweled rose beetle staggers through the pollen laden flowers of late spring gorging himself on plenty.
The Dame’s violets or gilly flowers are one of the great successes of my garden. Hesperis matronalis grows wild in Europe, but has long been cultivated in gardens for its sweet smell and tall purple blossoms. I dug this up from the green waste site in the village, when I first took possession of my utterly empty garden and could not wait to populate it with plants.
I bought all sorts of exotic flowers that secumbed to slugs or drought or rot, but the Dame’s Violet grew and multiplied steadily each year, until now it makes a spring show to over shadow everything else. It seems the best things in life really are free and you can share them with the birds and bees and the Eastern potentates too!
Snow in Spring time.
Along the stream crack willows grow. Planted generations ago to provide wands for basket weaving, periodically the willows are still cut back hard and I fret about the birds that used to feed and nest in them.
And then they grow back thicker and lusher than before, noisy with black caps, loud with lovely yellow hammers and wheezy with green finches.
And then they set seed and a blue May morning is filled with down shaken from a pillow and impossible snow flakes drifting down, caught on a breeze, confusing the eyes with delight.
Look hard at the blue photo and you can follow their transient trajectory too!
Thursday 2.35 pm
The Girl
One day life stands
gently smiling like a girl
suddenly on the far side of the stream
and asks
(in her annoying way ),
But how did you end up there?
By Lars Gustafsson translated from the Swedish by John Irons
printed Essential Poems Bloodaxe books 2012
Slow Business.
Earlier in the year I found a Roman snail shell close up for for the winter, safely sealed behind a calcerious door. Well, spring is here and the snails are out and about, looking for love. On a damp Sunday afternoon, these two plump snails found each other and slowly, very slowly, did what snails do.
After their amorous interlude, they may have been tempted to go back to bed, as the temperature here has fallen dramatically in the last few days . It seems that the Ice Saints are back again; that strange dip in temperature that is well known in southern Germany and northern Switzerland during during the middle of May.
This odd blip in the temperature is named after the saints days that occur at this time . At the moment we are enjoying cold Kalt Sofia, but my favourite is Saint Pancreas, who is yet to arrive ( maybe there is the wrong type of ice on the tracks!).
https://wordpress.com/post/cathysrealcountrygardencom.wordpress.com/2625
Look!
Its real spring now and swallows are scissoring across the sky catching insects. Old meadows underneath the cherry trees are loaded with flowers before the mowers slice them down to make hay for the pampered ponies of the rich girls from Basel.
Amongst the grass there are ox eye daisies, buttercups and tall goats beards, meadow clary, eggs and bacon, hoary plantains, hay rattle and clustered bell flowers.
The moth trap has caught a few equally beautifully named specimens to admire in the early morning quiet; great oak beauties, muslin moths, pine sphinxes and this pale tussock who came to rest on my cap over night. Evocative names, unfathomable eyes and in the case of the pale tussock moth: disturbingly hairy claspers!
Putting your money where your mouth is!
On Earth day I declared my garden pesticide free. Sounds good doesnt it? I think youngsters call it virtue signaling, or boasting in real speak.
That means no slug pellets and no chemi death to save my box hedge from the terrible china moth that has killed so many lovely box hedges across Europe. The slug pellets I am weaning myself off. I have found lettuces that they don’t eat and I try not to grow flowers that they like. However last night I found my irises being quietly shreded by little slugs working in tiny teams to saw through the stems of the unopened flowers and I felt my resolve slipping . Overhead a bat was stiching the night air and his clicks and whirs were ticking through my bat detector box, as he caught his night flying bugs. I turned back to the house and there in the dusk was a fat hedgehog snuffling.
They are the reason I made my rash pledge. I want my little patch of heaven to be free of the chemicals that are killing our wildlife. The world outside of my garden may well be going to hell in a handbasket, but I have control of this tiny space and I have to keep it clean.
Today I spent another couple of hours picking revolting fat china moth caterpillars by hand off my box hedge. It was hardwork and the wretches kepts trying to wriggle out of the bucket before I could drown them. They are recent alien invaders and they have no natural predators in Europe. If I ignore them, they will eat the whole hedge . Then we both pressure hosed the hedge to try to blast away the ones I had missed . Neighbours stopped to ask what we were doing washing the hedge.
Green gardening is proving to be a lot of hard work, but the hedgehog says it is worth it!
New season resolutions for Earth Day.
Life and Death (in the garden!)
A rushed spring produced record amounts of pollen. The birch and beech and oak all showered down together with dandelion, leaving a bright yellow slick of dust on everything for weeks. There has been a little rain and some has washed away leaving golden runnels on the pavements, visible proof of the pulsing life of spring.
The wild strawberries are out and the slugs are carefully sawing their way through the stalks of each iris flower. The box tree hedge is alive with China moth caterpillars and I have filled a bucket with the wriggling horrors. I rashly vowed never to use pesticides in my garden again, so now each fat black and yellow wretch must be picked off by hand. It feels loathsomely virtuous and tomorrow I am going to turn the high pressure hose on them and see how they like that blast of clean bio warfare!
New season resolutions for Earth Day.
Cathy's real country garden 
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