Full Grown Weeds

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A nice thing about plants is that, if you don’t mind a few weeds (and I don’t) you can just leave them there and let them grow. Identifying grown plants with flowers is much easier and now after a wait I can add three extra species to the list. Not being that expert at plants, I finally registered and used Plantsnap App to help with identification - I have to say it saves a lot of time looking through my field guide!

Canadian Fleabane is one that I found last year, however then it was just a small impoverished thing growing in cracks in the paving - seeing the full grown plant I didn’t realise it was the same species. Field Pennycress is a new find, coming through the paving just feet from my front door,. The paved front yard is covered in plants and definitely a Pathclear-free zone. According to Wikipedia the Pennycress is a potential biofuel crop, so I suppose like the Fleabane if it gets to grow without the constraint of being stuck between paving slabs and trampled on by everyone, then it must grow to a more impressive height than my specimen!

The Common Ragwort and Spear Thistle have been growing up for weeks, me resisting the urge to pull them out, and are now 3-4 feet tall. It’s taken a good while for them to flower, but now they have and they can stay a little longer. Both plants are common around the village, and I’m hoping can attract some different insects into the garden. Some of the soldier beetles I saw walking up Alderton Hill last weekend isn’t too much to ask, is it?

Spring Cleaning

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Tidying out the shed this weekend didn’t turn up as many bugs as I was expecting. The shed starts to be quite rotten, especially around the base, so there is a lot of entry points for all kinds of creature to crawl in through. In the event though, apart from a few spiders and hibernating mosquitoes, there wasn’t so much to keep me from my spring cleaning. The spiders were mostly Black Lace Weavers (Amaurobius ferox, #103); I’m not sure where the other big spiders present back in the Autumn were hiding themselves. The mosquitoes, which were plentiful, were Common House Mosquito / House Gnat (Culex pipiens, #332). Happily neither one of them bites people much.

Elsewhere I disturbed a couple of toads that were getting intimate in the log store and found these primroses (Primula vularis), which were new for the list (#422)

Life in the Leaf Litter

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I tend to leave many of the fallen leaves from Autumn lying on the ground over the winter. This may not be gardening best-practice, but when the winter is hard leaf litter provides a shelter for insects and other creatures and somewhere for hungry birds to look for food when other options are no longer available. Last winter during “The Beast from the East” several blackbirds and redwings spent most of their days combing the fallen leaves for winter food. This year there seemed enough other food available and perhaps it wasn’t worth running the gauntlet of the neighbourhood cats to spend so much time on the ground.

Having raked up some of the excess leaves and put them in the compost bin, it was interesting to see this morning just how many bugs had crawled out. So many snails and four species of slug for starters, including #417 Marsh Slug (Deroceras laeve). Lots of Birch Catkin Bugs seem to have over-wintered in the leaf litter, along with loads of tiny spiders, springtails and mites. A small tear-shaped rove beetle, #417 Tachyporus hypnorum, was also new for the list. The hairy looking caterpillar is I think from a Scarlet Tiger moth.

Teaming with life, it shows how valuable leaf-litter is for over-wintering bugs (and the birds and animals that might eat them); a good argument for leaving the leaves through to spring.