Spring is sprung!

Well Spring is marching on and warmer weather appears at times to be on the way. 

In my last post I mentioned about plants that had been damaged by the winter and others that had seemed to survive.  I tidied the wildlife area and waited for things to develop.  So, here are a few things that are going well.


Flowering rosermary

The selection of herbs that always seem to be very popular with insects are doing very well.  This rosemary particularly looks and smells lovely.  Still no insects attracted to it, though.

I have continued the construction of a hardy and spikey area, firstly to stop people using our car park and wildlife area as a cut through (treading on all the carefully planned planting and possibly crushing little visitors) but also to introduce a different range of plants.  Thus I have added two gorse bushes.

Gorse

The fact that you see gorse all over harsh coastal areas, and also up the side of Olivers Mount in Scarborough, suggests that this is a hardy plant.  But from this link you can see that it also provides food and shelter to many insects and birds.



'Large White' Butterfly
 

We have had one very welcome visitor to our wildlife café and that is this large white butterfly.  It was attracted to a new osteospermum plant that I have put in to replace the two that were obliterated by easterly winds last winter.








With the purpose of telling you other types of wildlife that can be seen in the surrounding areas, I am reporting my very first sighting of a native English snake - an adder.  This was in Ravenscar, close to the old discussed railway station and on a patch of grass above the sea.  It was undoubtedly a young adder as this picture here, but it just crawled out of the undergrowth to be seen for a few seconds and then back into the undergrowth to disappear.  I couldn't take a picture as it was so quick, but truly and lovely thing to see. 

Spring 2015. What a Start!!

Well, I can't believe that last year's garden bioblitz was the last post I put on this blog.  2014 was a lovely summer, with really beautiful weather.  My tubs thrived and all went well.  But the beautiful weather also brought out lovely guests and we were so busy the blog went by the wayside!  Hay, ho.  That's the way things go sometimes.  Anyway.  A new year brings a start to the blog and spring has brought some wonderful suprises to my little wildlife garden. 

First to appear were a small number of snowdrops peaking their little white heads out into the harsh early spring weather.  These were then followed by crocuses.  I always forget what I have planted at the end of the previous year, so it's great when flowers emerge to remind me and show me that the planting was a success. 

Now, more recently we have daffodils.  I planted particularly small ones so that they had a better chance of avoiding any harsh winds.

 
Then. these lovely little pansies appeared.  I had planted them last summer and they flowered brilliantly.  Having died back it was lovely to see them make a further appearance this spring.

 Last autumn the buddleia was practically wiped out by a harsh wind, so I pruned it back quite brutally and hoped for the best.  Now as you can see the early growth is looking very positive.

There are some plants, such as the two lovely jolly osteospernums, that were also attacked by the harsh autumn winds.  I am not sure yet if they will recover, but fingers crossed!

There isn't much in the way of wildlife to report as yet, but I can't possibly not mention the fantastic sightings off Marine Drive of bottle nosed dolphins.  These lovely creatures have been seen several times and pictures of them are on our facebook page.  Also, Scarborough Porpoises on twitter have lots of information on sightings.

I mentioned the Garden Bioblitz earlier and 2015's Bioblitz is 30/31 May.  Have a look at the Bioblitz website if you fancy getting involved yourself.

My 2014 Garden BioBlitz

2014 Bioblitz weekend was held on 31 May and 1 June.  With a better start to the year, things were promising to be much better than last year's Bioblitz and the weekend was quite pleasantly warm and sunny at times.

Sadly, although there are bees buzzing around my wildlife planting area most of the time, they all packed up and left for this weekend, so I couldn't report any sightings of these.  However, other things did make an appearance.

With regard to wild plants (or weeds) not intentionally planted we had a  lovely display on the grass area in the car park.  Intentionally we hadn't mown this area until after the weekend and it was covered in daisies, dandelions and clover.

   

Rigwort Plantain

There was also the usual rigwort plantain on show and a couple of other plants, that I had to search out to other Bioblitzers to identify. . . . . 

Germander Speedwell

Gallium Aparin

One, with lovely little blue flowers, was successfully identified on ISpot as Germander Speedwell.  The other, was identified via twitter and the BioBlitz team, and was this very stickly Cleaver, Gallium Aparine, which I now found can actually be eaten

With regard to wildlife there were a number of  garden worms and ladybirds on show, but additionally in the absence of bees, hoverflies were showing their presence and appeared often throughout the weekend.  

Hoverfly

Millipede

Then the wonderful world that can be found underneath garden tubs shouldn't be ignored and this is where I found this millipede.  Quite difficult to photofraph as once the tubs are moved everything dashes to find new cover, but I did find one.  

All in all it was a fairly successful bioblitz.  Now we are in the middle of a beautifully warm and sunny week, the bees are out in force.  Very few butterflies as yet, but the buddliea does appear to be about to flower and so this might attract a few.  Here's hoping.                                  

                          

April sun and foggy mornings

It's been nearly a month since my last post and we have had the best and worst of Spring weather.  The run up to and over Easter was lovely, sunny, slightly chilly weather, but calm and pleasant.  Then, last Thursday saw a beautiful clear start to the day suddenly followed by a sea fret and the weather has been slightly damp and misty since then.  

But things are starting to grow and flourish, so hear is my latest update.

I have planted planted Hartsease seeds between paving slabs but am yet to see any life appear here.  Then Ox-Eye Daisy seeds being propogated in an old egg box are coming through but not big enough to plant outside yet.  I will this week be planting Corn Marigold seeds straight outside with a great deal of hope and optimism!

Here are some of the things that are happening.

I mentioned previously that bulbs were coming through and this is the flower of one that has proved most successful.  

Flowering Thyme

The thyme in my pot of herbs is flowering beautifully at the moment

Osteospermum

The Osteospermum plant put in a tub for the first time last year is flowering.  The flowers have tried to come through a few times during late Winter and very early Spring but they do need a certain amount of sunlight to open up fully and this picture was taken on a bright day.  Today is a bit cloudy and the flowers aren't as open at all.

 Obviously the whole point of what I am doing is to attract wildlife and so here are the first two small sightings.  A Ladybird was happily nestled on some longer grass.  Quite close then was this snail . . . .  

This picture was taken on a wet day, hence the snail was very happy.  I don't like really like snails as they can destroy plants in a flash but I did think this one had a shell worth noting.

Needless to say the seagulls are once again building nests on the roof so we are finding bits of nesting material dropped outside the front of Phoenix Court and regularly seeing seagulls flying away with tufts of loose grass and plant material.

Back to winter

After a gloriously warm few days, which tricked everyone into thinking that the winter was over, we have once again returned to more normal March temperatures with some morning frosts and icy winds.  However, I have endeavoured to continue tidying up my garden area and found some positive things happening already.

I planted some bulbs at the end of 2012 and these produced a beautiful result last year.  Now I see they are nearly ready to flower again, producing some cheerful colour into the bed around the car park.






Also, right by these, the trusty armeria plants are showing signs of life and will soon be flowering in their lovely bright pink colour and starting to attract the early season insects.

Plants that struggled through the harsh 2012/13 winter have had a much easier time of it this year and so the two hebes that I have in tubs are looking quite robust.  They really struggled to do anything last year after being nearly destroyed by the weather but hopefully this year they will flower much more.

I am ready with seeds to plant - Hartsease to put in cracks in walls and paving, ox-eye daisy for my wild flower areas and corn marigold for the car park areas.  All of these should attract wildlife.

You might have heard the old tale - 'When in the trees the rooks build high expect the summer to be warm and dry'  Well we don't get many rooks right by us but someone who lives in another part of Scarborough has said that this is exactly what the rooks are doing.  Rooks, as you might know (particularly if you follow Autumn or Spring Watch), are incredibly clever birds.  So maybe they do know something.

Additionally I have heard that minke whales have been sighted by fishermen 25 miles off the coast.  This shows that as the sea warms up the smaller fish that these whales feed on are being attracted by the food further down the food chain.

So maybe Spring is coming?????

Spring has sprung

Well, Spring appears to have arrived, at least for a few days and armed with a pair of new garden shears I have started the job of clearing up the garden and tub areas.

My main concern was that the buddleia was sprouting new green leaves the expected 12 cm up the old stems and therefore the old growth from last year was looking brown and lifeless above the new shoots.  This has now been rectified, as shown below.


So it looks like this might do quite well this year and hopefully attract a few more butterflies than last year.

The snow drops are coming to the end of their flowering life now but when fully open they are really pretty.  As I had a 50% increase on last year, I will try to pop a few more bulbs in later this year and with any luck have another massive increase in numbers next year.

Not much to say as yet on the wildlife spotting front although I understand the Peregrine Falcons are nesting on the north bay again this year, but I don't know exactly where as yet.  I will find out and let people know.

Also, unusually a sea lion has been making an appearance on the south bay over the last few weeks.  It comes in, lies on the beach and then leaves as the tied goes out.  The police, I understand, have been putting a cordon round it to protect it.  I can't imagine this is going to be a regular event but it's quite nice if likes the beach in Scarborough at least for a while.

Strange things happening over the winter.

Last year was so terrible weather wise, cold and icy for a long time during Spring, this might have helped strawberry growers, but it didn't help me with my attempts to grown things.  The Garden BioBlitz in June was terribly diffucult as everything was so backward and the plants weren't attracting insects.  Hence I didn't do much to my plants over the summer and the blog also suffered.  The weather did get better and business was good but the plants had to fend for themselves.

Now it's 2014 and I am starting again.

To compensate for the poor start to the summer, we have got off very lightly in Scarborough compared to other parts of the country.  It has been wet, cold at times and gloomy, but compared to previous winters actually quite mild.  As an example, the osteospermum that I planted last winter started flowering in January.  The flowers on this need sun to fully open and so they have stayed tightly shut.  But actually there are as many flowers as in the summer.

A few nasturtium seeds were also coming through in December.  No further results than are shown in this picture, however, but still very strange.

Over the last few weeks a few snow drops have appeared.  This was a better showing than last year and they look so jolly and optimistic during the cold winter months.
You can tell that I haven't done a lot of weeding.  This is mainly due to the amount of work we have been doing indoors to get ready for the new season, but it also provides a happy hibernating place for insects.

So things are ready to go, plants have survived a mild winter better than the past harsh snow filled winters and it looks like it might be a good year.

Here's hoping.

A very busy Summer

Wow, my last post was in July and now it's 21 August.  We've been so busy welcoming and looking after our lovely guests that the garden and this blog has had to take a back seat.

However, whilst being ignored things are happening to my plants.  One constant success are the two sea thistle plants - eryngium planum and giganteum.  The thistles are ever popular with bees and I often see them buzzing around.

There hasn't been a wide variety of butterflies but I very often see cabbage whites around.

On a grander scale some of our guests saw a couple of cormorants from their window in Room 17.  With a pair of binoculars they watched them for a while to fully identify them and then continued to watch them as they caused havoc with the seagulls.  I think I saw them over the north bay a few days later, again annoying the sea gulls.  From the link above, it is clear that they are resident in this area, so I hope to see them again some time.

I now have several armeria plants around different parts of our gardens and tubs and these continue to flower and also do their job in attracting bees.

August is always busy and obviously our time to do things like garden is limited.  But September (when the weather can still be lovely) will provide more time and more things will happen.

Not just a cafe, now a hotel!

We are currently enjoying lovely warm and balmy weather.  It's been like this for several days now and is expected to last a little longer yet.  This means that everything is growing, flowers are developing and insect life is increasing.

Osteospermum Iced Gem

My new addition is the plant Osteospermum 'Iced  Gem'.  These plants are very popular with bees, butterflies and general bird life and this one is supposed to be quite hardy.  We shall see.  Anyway it looks very lovely as it opens completely each day in the sun shine.

Cornflower

After last year's hopeless disaster with cornflower seeds I am so pleased that this year, I have managed to grow several lovely tall plants, that are now flowering.  We currently have four lovely bright blue flowers and many more promising buds.

Cuckoo Spit

This plant is the residence of something I have never quite understood before 'cuckoo spit'.  I have seen it but never know what it is.  Well, apart from the fact that it starts to appear on plants in spring, when you might start to hear cuckoos, this has nothing whatsoever to do with cuckoos.  It is, in fact, a white frothy liquid secreted by the immature nymphs of a sap-sucking insect known as a froghopper. (Philaenus spumarius) The froth is there to protect the nymph and has very little detrimental effect on the plant.  Here is the cuckoo spit we have and so this froghopper nymph might be our first permanent or long term resident!

I very often now see bees hovering around one or other of my plants but as yet, only the extremely rare butterfly.  The buddleia plant now has growing buds, which should flower soon and this might be enough to attract some into our garden.

Summer's here and so is a bee!

After a long winter, a slow spring and very little happening, we have passed the longest day and things seem to be picking up.  I hope I'm not speaking too soon, but anyway things are flowering and today has been particularly sunny and pleasant.

So to my first bee.. . .  As I was pulling out weeds that have shot up due to the rain and warm weather, I saw this small bee hovering around on an armeria plant. These seem to be one of the most successful flowering plants I have and they consistently seem to attract bees, if the bees are out there.  This was a particularly small bee but nevertheless one of the first adventurers into this part of Scarborough.




Then, as if to prove that there is hope of further insect life, I was about to pull up a weed and saw this hoverfly settled on it.  I watched it for a few minutes and it obviously liked this type of weed.  But, when it had gone I am afraid to say I pulled it out.  There are plenty of other plants to attract the hoverly back and I am sure as weeds are strong they will grown back occasionally.



Other things are starting to happen and I finally nearly have some cornflowers.  They are tall and starting to develop a flower head.  So hopefully in not too long there will be some lovely blue flowers to keep the insects happy.







Also, last year's very successful sea thistle (eryngium gigantium) is starting to shoot up.  This was so popular with bees last year, the sooner it can develop the thistle the better.  I also have one in a pot, but this isn't growning quite as well so I might have to think about moving it.

All in all, quite a positive afternoon spent doing some weeding and seeing the progress.  Hopefully just a beginning.

Garden Bioblitz 2013

Well on the weekend of 1st and 2nd June, the 2013 Garden Bioblitz happened.  It was a good fun event, with lots of input from Bioblitzers on Twitter.  Last year, the event happened in July and so, being earlier this year and also in a very late Spring, at Phoenix Court, wildlife was quite hard to find.  However, we did get a few wonderful bug sightings.

It was quite a cloudy day to start and so I did a lot of hunting under tubs and pots.  The first things I saw were several generations of pill woodlice under a paint pot, being stored outside.  This isn't a good picture, as they were moving very fast, but there were all sizes and ages.  This is the

Pill Woodlice

only type of woodlice I have seen before and I didn't quite know that there were many and varied varieties.

My knowledge of woodlice was therefore increased 100% when I found what I learned to be a common shiny woodlouse.  The latin name is Oniscus Asellus.  The link here shows pictures taken by a much better photographer than me!  These are larger than the Pill Woodlice shown here and move much more slowly. But still too fast for a decent photo!




Having searched fairly unsuccesfully for wildlife I was even quite pleased to find these snails on my Sea Holly Plant.  I wouldn't normally be happy about them being there at all, but at least they showed that something was living in my garden.

Egg of Common Gull

Obviously one common wildlife element is the seagulls that are nesting on the roof.  Seagulls are well known to anyone staying in Scarborough and these ones sometimes make people jump by standing on the flat roof outside one of our top floor rooms, or also standing on the domed glass at the top of one of our staircases.  This gives a very odd picture of two webbed feet and the underside of a seagull.  This egg was found at the back of Phoenix Court earlier this week.



A bit more searching and a little bit of gentle digging produced some

Garden Centipede

earth worms and also this rather wonderful garden centipede.  Bright orange, it curled itself onto the pen I was prodding gently into the soil and this enabled me to lift it onto a wall.  At which point it spread to its full length and eventually disappeared under the stone it is heading towards.

The next day I had another search as the sun was shining a bit more and it looked generally a bit more promising.  Well, luck prevailed and I actually saw my first few ladybirds of 2013.  Last year there were loads of them around but they have been extremely elusive so far.

With a final bit of prodding in a wall I found this house spider.  It appeared out of a crack in the wall but disappeared into another one just as quickly.

The only flying insect I saw was a hoverfly and there was no way I could get a picture of this.

Ribwort Plantain

Plant life wise, the things that are going strong but that have found their way accidentally into our garden are clover, and Ribwort Plantain, which shows up on the car park lawn regularly.

Since the Bioblitz things have started flowering in my wildlife planting area and I have also started to see the occasional cabbage white butterfly around, but nothing made a show last weekend.

All in all, the Garden Bioblitz is great fun.  It's good to go searching round your garden to see what is living there - however small and insignificant or grand and wonderful this might be.  The help provided via twitter in identifying bugs and plants was great.

So why not keep your eyes open and have a go next year if you didn't get involved in 2013.

When will things start to happen?

This week, BBC Springwatch is starting, so spring must be here.  Also it's only one week to Garden BioBlitz weekend when I hope to be able to find lots of wildlife and plant life in my garden patch to report on.  However, as everyone knows, plants are so far behind after the long cold winter and therefore insects that rely on the plants are having a hard time.

On a positive note I saw my first butterfly of this year on Sunday in St Mary's Church yard - a red admiral, no picture, obviously.  I have also seen a few bees exploring my bee friendly plants.

However, the required blooms are still reluctant to appear.  Daisies open up every morning and sea thrift (almeria) plants are doing well.  Others are getting there but slowly.

Nasturtium seedlings.

I planted some nasturtium seeds in April and so far three have appeared.  As one plant can produce a lot of flowers three might be OK and also there's still time for some more to push there way out.

This poppy has survived from
last year and looks more and more ready to flower, but is still holding out.  Behind in a pot you can also see the sea holly (eryngium planum) that I planted a few weeks ago.  It looks healthy enough, but no sign of a thistle as yet.  The tall green streak in the same pot as the poppy is a garlic bulb that I thought I should try to grow.

Cornflower plants

I mentioned in a previous post that I had planted some cornflower seeds.  I protected them against damage from birds and snails by putting some netting over them, but they have just become tall enough for the netting to become a hindrance.  This week I plan to spread them around and give them more space to grow.mentioned in a previous post that I had planted some cornflower seeds.  I protected them against damage from birds and snails by putting some netting over them, but they have just become tall enough for the netting to become a hindrance.  This week I plan to spread them around and give them more space to grow.

I have four herb plants in one long pot and the chive plant shown here has produced some lovely buds, I just hope that in the next few days they will actually open up as these are very enticing for insects.

Last week we had a terrible stormy north wind for 24 hours, which gave everything a battering, but yesterday and today it's warm and sunny.   I have been out and watered everything and fingers crossed things might start happening this week.

We can only hope. . . .

Just a progress report.

It's that time of year again when the seagulls are nesting and the front of the guest house is scattered with bits of grass that have dropped out of a seagull's mouth as it flies off to its nesting site.

I have seen seagulls at the back of our building picking up bits of grass.  This one pictured is flying off over the North Bay.

I have had a sliver of success with bulbs despite the failure of most of them due to the slow start to spring.  Last autumn I planted some dwarf tulips and they have been flowering for two weeks now.  This picture was taken towards the end of their flowering life, but they looked very beautiful and offered a promise of more flowers to come.

Dwarf tulips

Almeria

You will see also that the Almerias I planted and that were so successful last year are now starting to come back. These ones shown here are against a sheltered wall but the others are not far behind.

Sedum

Last year I planted a Sedum; these are very popular with butterflies.  It practically disappeared over the winter to the point where I could hardly remember what it was.  But now it is returning very strongly and healthily.  This might yet then be stronger than last year.

Also, returning healthily from practically nothing is the buddleia that proved so tough last year.  It is now growing lovely healthy leaves and recovering from the long winter.

Buddleia

The cornflower seeds that I planted a few weeks ago are growing well and are still protected by the netting I put up.  Hopefully I will avoid the total disappearance that happened last year.  Nearly 10 days ago I put in some nasturtium seeds, but no sign of growth from them yet.




I mentioned in my last post that I was planning to look at composting and since then I have decided upon a dual Bokashi system.  I haven't got this yet, but I will be getting this going quite soon.

Despite everything the only wildlife of any sort that I have seen amongst my plants are baby snails.  So I can sense a season long battle with these guys coming on.