Nature Blog by Jenny Bourne

The warm and occasionally wet weather has meant there are still plenty of flowers around for the bees and other beneficial insects. October so far has been a lovely month, with days of autumnal blue skies and bright sun, early mists and some very welcome downpours after the drought months.

It’s getting to that time of year when we’re beginning to think about turning and forking out our compost bins and heaps ready for mulching and feeding up the soil. As these heaps are warm and relatively undisturbed for most to the year they make a very good over-wintering location for creatures such as hedgehogs, grass snakes and slow worms. Unfortunately we can unwittingly be the cause of harm

The topmost penthouse suites in the new Pollinator Patch bee hotel are now almost all taken. This post from the Natural History Society of Northumbria gives an informative view of these valued and hard working native bees, explaining also why they are such good pollinators:
“Often looked by their furrier and larger cousins, solitary bees in fact make up over 90% of bee species found in Britain.

The communal flowerbeds for pollinators have suffered through the past weeks of drought and heat conditions, but after a few heavy showers there’s signs of life returning! Flowering plants that survived the record breaking temperatures and lack of rain include sedums (although I did need to water one initially), perovskia with it’s attractive silver grey foliage and blue flowers, nepeta now on it’s second flowering and helleniums. And the indefatigable solidago providing a vibrant splash of yellow but a bit of a thug..!

This week is National Allotments week, with a theme of ‘Bugs, Bees and Broccoli’ to acknowledge the importance of gardening with nature in mind: ‘An allotment plot is a complex web of plants, micro-organisms, fungi, insects and animals