Nature Blog by Jenny Bourne

Almost June and the warm weather with a little rain has brought on the vegetables, the flowers and the plants in the wrong place (aka ‘weeds’!). I’ve been musing on the ways that we grow flowers on our respective plots and flowers on allotments generally.

A small but select group of us met early on Sunday morning for a May bird walk guided by Jon around the site, binoculars ready and listening out for familiar and not so familiar bird songs and calls. Swifts were wheeling high in the sky and we were lucky to both see and hear a whitethroat – one of the summer visitors. Jon says it’s so much easier to find a bird if you can identify its song or call and this whitethroat performed splendidly,

Habitats & Heritage held their popular annual Plant Sale for Wildlife yesterday at Kilmorey Mausoluem, where I had an interesting chat with Karen, a Twickenham beekeeper.

The solitary bee posts are giving up their newly emerged occupants – the bees have been emerging from their sandy loam sealed holes over the past couple of weeks. It’s always pleasing to see that the habitats we make for these fascinating and beneficial pollinators are used but there’s more to giving a helping hand to wildlife. Once out of their winter quarters the bees need to feed and that’s where we can really help out, by providing the flowers and flowering trees and shrubs on which they depend.

A perfect morning of warm April sun got us up early to the plot preparing a bed for the peas, when a flash of silver blue fluttered over the newly turned compost– the first Holly Blue of the season, probably just emerged from the nearby holly bush at the end of the site road.