Sunday 18 October 2015

Birds, bees, butterflies and other creatures.

Despite the wet summer there have been very many bumble bees in my garden this year of all sizes and colours. As I have large areas of brambles and rough grass there is always plenty of nesting areas for them. Unfortunately it has been a very poor year for the honey bees which is worrying and a disastrous summer for the butterflies. We have had 3 weeks of very fine autumn weather but even then there were only a few butterflies- small tortoiseshell, red admirals, peacocks, white and green veined whites and quite a few wall and meadow browns. The only butterflies to do well this year again are the speckled wood which have only recently appeared on the Isle of Man.
As I have such a huge variety of wild plants and herbs I always have great numbers of other flying creatures and spiders, too many to know what they all are and also there are quite a few small frogs hopping about the place.
I attended a wonderful event last nice held by Mother T's Community Cafe in Laxey. Great company, music, food , friends old and new and all very local. Wonderful! We need more events like this.
I had some of my small dragonfly hangings there for sale as well as a lot of other work of mine.
The photo on the left is an area of my garden that self seeds now with brassicas, broad beans, poppies, cornflowers, ribwort plantain and many other edibles and wild plants. It certainly is easier than sowing them. There are also goldenrod plants that I use as dyes and Euphorbia mellifera plants that are now enormous. The latter have very boring loooking flowering parts in early spring but they have a wonderful smell of honey which makes me want to run in and butter a piece of bread to go with some of our locally produced honey. By the way, the honey is now spun from our area only and since then my asthma has improved dramatically. the Euphorbia is a great attractant for insects in the spring, a welcome early feed.