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.