Spring's first bee

I'd just typed in a couple of sentences of this post when the window cleaner turned up. Cue lots of barking from our enraged terrier and a scramble for me as I search for change.

What I'd written went something like: Seen your first bumblebee yet? The weather has been just right here for the last few days, but no sign of any queens.

But now I'm back in front of the computer that's out of date. While I was at the front door chatting my first bee of the year flew by, fast and high. Fresh out of hibernation, it looked like it was a bee on a mission. 

Anyway, what I wanted to do was put a link here to a really useful crib sheet for gardeners who want to make their gardens as bee-friendly as possible. It's been put together by the charity Buglife and it offers the general advice that you'll find elsewhere, but also links to a detailed list of plants that are useful to bumblees and the ones that are not good at all.
 

Slowly, but surely

How long does it take to make a new woodland? Well, on the face of it about ten years. By chance I found myself in south Derbyshire at the weekend almost exactly a decade since I moved on from a job with the National Forest Company.

You may not have heard about the National Forest, it doesn't get the recognition it deserves. Set up in the early 1990s, it's a landscape-scale experiment that is working to re-forest a chunk of the Midlands that had been scarred by a couple of centuries of mining.

When I worked with the project lots of planting had already happened, but there was much still to be done. I was there when the target of five million trees planted was reached.

Apparently now they've got close to eight million. That has pushed forest cover up from six per cent at the start to about 19 per cent now.
It was good to go back as a visitor. We did a bit of walking, went to the visitor centre and rode on the little train. All the touristy things.

The project got some national media coverage in its first couple of years, but then journalists got bored with the story. The news media can't deal with the long-term.

After a bit we became the butt of jokes and the National Forest got tagged the 'National Forest of Sticks'.  Lots of treeguards, not many trees.
So, it was great to be back on a sunny, early spring day and be surrounded by trees - not sticks. I remember wading around in mud on bleak hillsides on cheerless winter's days tree-planting with schoolkids. Now, although there isn't  'proper' woodland yet, it's well on the way. It warmed the cockles of my heart.

That's champion

Apparently the Hedgehog Street campaign now has more than 20,000 people signed up as Hedgehog Champions, which isn't bad. There's something about that phrase 'hedgehog champion' that makes me smile, though I'm not sure why. 

The 20,000 aren't gold medal-winning hedgehogs, but green gardeners who want to make their communities a little more hedgehog-friendly. And with that many supporters the campaign should begin to make things happen.

The idea is that Hedgehog Street will make the nation's gardens a little more useful as hedgehog habitat. Look at the website for advice on linking gardens, proving shelter, feeding and how to remove common hazards.

Hedging my bets

After a lot of thought I've picked my follow-tree. A difficult choice to make it was too. I've plumped for a garden tree because I can visit it every day and have also gone for one that is usuallyoverlooked.

And the winner is... an ash that is part of our boundary hedge. Our garden is long and thin and slopes steeply, with the house at the top and this hedge is as far from the house as you can get.

I've looked at old maps and the house has been here since at least 1880 and this bit of hedge pre-dates it. Over the years it has been pruned back and it has been laid, so my tree is short and barrel-chested and has thick boughs that grow sideways from its trunk. It's like a mature tree that has been put on its side.

I cut it back pretty radically a couple of winters ago, so it has lots of growth from last summer coming out of it hedgehog-style, upwards and sideways.

Plenty of ivy growing on it too with a few berries that the blackbirds have left uneaten. No sign of the ash buds fattening up at the moment. But on the bank below things are happening; snowdrops are in bloom and the delicate shoots of what I think is dog's mercury are just starting to push through the soil.

Drop dead gorgeous?

What is it about the humble snowdrop that provokes such strong emotions? Some, a galantophobe splinter faction, rant about them. And, of course, their are the hardcore galantophiles who can't get enough of the things.

With a single bulb going for £725 this week it looks like the war of words about snowdrops is going to run and run. Here, hedgerow snowdrops are coming into bloom and look as good to me (or not, depending on personal taste) as the £725-a-shot 'Elizabeth Harrison'.
Personally, I love their durability. They look gentle, but that's deceptive. Along the banks of the river here snowdrops are doing their thing where the winter floods have stripped the soils away to expose the bulbs. 

I like them, but only so much. On the woodland floor, in long-established drifts, they're quite beautiful, but for me snowdrops rarely work "in captivity" - they tend to look contrived. So, £725 well spent? Not really.

Follow that... tree

Why not? I stumbled upon the idea of tree-following last night at a great blog called On the Edge Gardening and followed a link on to Lucy's Loose and Leafey to discover that everybody already seems to be at it.

And I love the sentiment. Us tree-lovers notice favourite trees, or at least I do, and witness the changes that happen to them and around them. But it's a step on to document that change through a blog.
I've spent rather too much of today driving but that's givien me time to think about tree-following (rather than milk tanker-following, which I seemed to spend hours doing). Tomorrow I'm going out with a camera to 'interview' candidates for the role of followed tree - the problem is how to pick just one?

The Year of the Frog?

You really do learn something every day, don't you? At this time of year I spend a lot of time staring into my small-but-beautifully-formed garden pond hoping to spot some movement among all the foliage.

It's time for the frogs and newts to move in and to celebrate that Eighties classic 'Love Action' in their own special way. Two or three springs ago the pond was so full of sex-crazed frogs that the spawn threatened to overflow the sides.

Then I was counting a dozen or more frogs at any one time, but more recently only two or three have been turning up. Disappointing.

I've assumed that it's all been about the last two or three very cold winters, but perhaps there's more to it than that. Reading Sussex Wildlife Trust's blog today I see that of its FAQ on all things amphibian one is about frog/newt interaction.

Photo: Viridiflavus

Last year my pond was home to lots of smooth newts. Looking into the water with a torch after dark you'd usually see seven or eight going about their business.

Now, I know that newts predate small tadpoles, but hadn't thought they could have that much of an impact. But SWT reckons that the two have a "boom-bust" relationship. Ponds with lots of newts tend to have fewer frogs, it says.

As frog numbers fall though a pond supports fewer newts - and that can make for more frogs in following years. So, will 2012 be the Year of the Frog or the Year of the Newt?

Stumped, or almost

What did Churchill say in that speech about the beginning of the end and the end of the beginning? Well, after close to a decade here I'm past the latter and certainly well on from end of the beginning of Project Leylandii.

In the same speech he talked about blood, tears, toil, and sweat and there was definitely been some of each during what has been a long campaign.

Let me explain, my predecessor, the Baptist minister, clearly loved Leylandii. He surrounded most of the garden with a Leylandii hedge and then planted little blocks of the evergreen here and there too. 

Presumably he bought in bulk and decided to use the leftovers at the end of the hedge-planting. Anyway, bit by bit I've taken them out and replaced them over the years.

And I started out on the last remnant in November. A bank had been covered with Leylandii by the enthusiastic Rev and each of his saplings had done what they do so well - grow and gorw and grow. 

The biggest had a diameter of about 30cm at the base. My chainsaw made short work of the trees and the best of trunks are now in fireplace-friendly lengths and seasoning for the log burner next winter.

The brash went off to the council tip, leaving me with a collection of stumps to deal with - and that's proving to be a real slog. Today I've been hacking away at them again - England is in the deep freeze, but here on the Cych it's a mild, spring-like day.

I've also started out on the digging. The bank drops about two metres in a couple of my paces, so I need to build some sort of retaining wall at the base and then level the slope out a bit before replanting.

Lots to do, but at least the Leylandii is now no more. More toil, more sweat, hopefully no tears.

(nest)Boxing Day

Is tomorrow. Or so the RSPB says. By their reckoning this weekend is the last opportunity to get nestboxes up and ready before the breeding season kicks in.

Here, I think the spell of cold weather has delayed things a bit. Given the low temperatures the birds seem more focused on finding food than anything else.
National Nesbox Week starts on Valentine's Day, so I'd make the deadline weekend the 18th and 19th. Perhaps this weekend is the one to spend making a nestbox - or buying one from the garden centre.
But the RSPB's nudge will prompt me into action. I've taken one of my nestboxes down and it's sitting in the shed waiting for a few much-needed repairs. It now goes to the top of this weekend's gardening 'to do' list. 

Ice with that?

It looks like the mini-Ice Age is coming to an end here in our corner of Wales. Which is a bit of a shame. I've really enjoyed finally having lots of birds at the feeders and seeing blue skies after what seems like months of grey.

But the best of it all has been frozen, iron-hard ground where there has been welly-deep mud. The garden has been bad enough, but the field we keep our ponies in has been terrible.

It's mostly river floodplain and has been like a quagmire since October. The freeze has given me the chance to get around repairing fences and tidying up without sinking in to mud that's the consistency of porridge. Now the rain is coming back I suppose treacle-wading will be the order of the day once again and the wellies will have to come back out of the shed.

Plight of the bumblebee

Sorry about the dire pun, but I couldn't resist it. An iron-hard freeze here this morning, so very much still winter but we are getting close to when queen bumblebees first emerge from hibernation here.

Anyone who cares about these things has been worrying about the decline in the populations of bees and other pollinators for years now, but  it's good to see that other people are cottoning on to the connection between good harvests and buzzy things with wings.

It's good to see that the farming media is reporting on the story and giving space to an academic, Prof Simon Potts of the University of Reading, to tell its audience that: "The value of pollination services to agriculture in the UK is about £440 million per year, with the most valuable contributions made by wild bees."

It's difficult to avoid sounding preachy on this subject, so I'll borrow from David Attenborough instead. He says: ‘If we and the rest of the back-boned animals were to disappear overnight, the rest of the world would get on pretty well. But if the invertebrates were to disappear, the world’s ecosystems would collapse.’

Early warning

We've dodged most of the snow here on the Cych, but it has been a cold, cheerless week. So it's good to know that it looks like spring is heading our way.

Or cuckoos are anyway. I really enjoyed being able to track last year's cuckoo migration via the British Trust for Ornithology's satellite tracking project.

vogelart.info

Transmitters that weigh just 5g were been fitted to five cuckoos and BTO scientists tracked their journeys between here and Africa. It meant that you could follow their journeys at the BTO's website and on the trip south it became a nail-biter as they flew over Europe and then the Sahara through all sorts of hazards.

And it looks like it's happening all over again. All the birds have spent the winter in the Congo, but now two of the five have started moving north and west, which could mean that they're on their way.

Don't hold your breath though as it takes some time. One of the five, Martin, left England at the end of June last year and it took the bird a leisurely three weeks to get to the toe of Italy before a two day sprintover the Sahara to Chad.