Tag Archives: moths

Butterflies, Moths, Buddleia and Mint

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The Butterfly Count is upon us for 2017 and Julia is preparing  the materials for the group.

We had a preparatory look in the garden on Friday to get some idea of what was about, and had a good result, considering it was a cold day. The buddleia didn’t attract much (possibly because it’s planted in a shady spot) but the mint attracted a lot of pollinators and the Mint Moths. (Mint Moths are only about quarter of an inch across (6mm) in real life – don’t go looking for something the same size as the photo). I didn’t see butterflies on the mint, but they were mainly seen in the area around the mint.

Comma

Mint Moth

Painted Lady

Red Admiral

Speckled Wood

White, Large

There was also an unidentified white, an unidentified brown (probably Meadow Brown or Gatekeeper) and an unidentified brown Skipper.

Speckled Wood
Red Admiral

We need to add a few more plants around the place – more buddleia would be good, and oregano used to attract a lot of butterflies when we were at the Ecocente. Although the Mencap garden isn’t anywhere near as good as the Centre garden for attracting butterflies, it’s still as exciting to try to spot new species and plan to attract more. We have a few buddleia seedlings to donate and I’ll have to persuade Julia to grow oregano.

The last week has been reasonably good in the house garden (which is a bit of a butterfly wasteland), with Small Tortoiseshell, Large White and Orange Underwing moth all seen this week. There are Mint Moths in a herb garden along the street and I live in hope of seeing another Hummingbird Hawk Moth on the Red Valerian like we did (twice) in 2015.

Time to start giving some serious thought to our own garden, after a year of hacking back in 2016.

I’m slightly ambivalent towards buddleia as it’s a non-native species and can be considered a pest. I think it’s best summed up here by Butterfly Conservation – it’s a valuable source of nectar and is OK in gardens. However, it doesn’t feed caterpillars and it can be invasive in the wrong place.

There are other plants to feed butterflies and caterpillars, as this list shows.

Chickens, chintz and a confederacy of dunces

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It’s been hot, and the poultry and the polytunnels have both needed a lot of water. So did I by the time I’d spent the best part of twenty minutes in the tunnels.

However, I did get a reasonable picture of an angle shades moth, as featured in the opening picture. We had one about two years ago. It was blown onto a table outside while I was having a drink on a blustery day, clung on for a few minutes to allow me to take a blurred picture, and then flew away at high speed as the wind took it again.

This one was more leisurely.

We’ve had an attack of chintz in the cafe, which is starting to resemble my memories of my grandmother’s front room. Apart from the piles of sugary snacks and the juice drinks, and the notices. Looks like we’re having a turf war again, as all my pizza ingredients and the emergency gluten free bases have all been moved to the ice cream freezer. Apart from the notice banning me from the fridge freezer I’ve had another one ordering me not to move anything round.

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I’ve also had to move out of the store cupboard I was using so they could fit an extra table in.

Jonathan Swift wrote: When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.

It does seem that there is a confederacy of dunces ranged against me, but I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions.

They have a group of specially invited people coming round on Saturday to test the new look cafe. Now, I’m not a marketing genius but, as I’ve been telling them for a while, the people we need to talk to are the ones that don’t come, or the ones who come once and don’t come back. The friends who come for a chat every Saturday morning are nice people and loyal customers, but their opinions aren’t going to help us appeal to a wider customer base.

Needless to say, I haven’t been invited. It must be something I said…

We’ve had a good showing of Small Tortoiseshells in the last week or so, which is a relief as they seemed to have almost died out. There is a parasitic wasp that attacks them; it arrived from the continent some years ago and in some areas has almost wiped the Small Tortoiseshell out. We’ve also had several pairs of Painted Ladies, some silver Y moths and an upsurge of mint moths.

So far we haven’t had any hummingbird hawk moths this year but they only started to show in late August last year so there is still hope.

A blog in in which fingers are mentioned

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I’ve been sleeping badly for the last few nights because I have a painful finger. Yes, that’s right, the large bearded man is whining about his finger. Sorry, but it hurts and I can’t get to sleep.

I know it doesn’t measure up to the pain of childbirth and stuff like that, and I realise that having to open bottles with my left hand isn’t officially recognised as a disability but it’s amazing how a little thing like that can affect your life.

Probably the worst thing is the uhtceare. (Read the list behind this link by all means, but if you are one of those people who thinks in pictures, do not click the link in Number 9). Yes, fitful sleep causes a constant state of uhtceare, and for a man that has a lot to regret, this is not good. The result was that I travelled to work this morning wishing I didn’t have to go. This is very unusual.

Now, just in case you are thinking of telling me, as Julia does, that “it’s just arthritis”, stop and pause a minute – I don’t want to be told that bits of my body have entered old age.

Anyway, things got better when I reached the farm. The new apple press and scratter have arrived! We can now travel with and demonstrate pressing in schools (if anybody wants us while we have apples) and we can use it for the juicing days (starting from 12th September) instead of having to set the big one up to do a bucket of apples. That’s why the picture at the top of the blog shows two cardboard boxes. Not a very interesting picture by most standards, but quite exciting for me.

We had a nice steady flow of breakfast, there wasn’t much I needed to do and it was all very relaxed.I met the author of the nottsvillages blog, showed several people the visiting Painted Lady (it came back!), secured the offer of a moth trap, found a volunteer to do the job of Santa (let’s face it, I’m not a natural), took details from someone who wants to help with the bread group and took £10 after we were supposedly closed.

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As if that wasn’t enough, I also took the name of another baker, persuaded someone to come and do crafts at our Winter Event and had a good look round Project Molish (which started this weekend).

That, in the language of my youth, is a result!

I’m tired now – time for tea and cake, I think.

142 days until Christmas

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Have we really had 223 days of 2015 already?

Time really does fly as you get older, though whether that’s anything to do with the theories in the article, or just because you spend longer asleep in front of the TV is a moot point. In my case anyway, you may be a lot more active than I am.

I had an email this morning telling me that we have to have news of Christmas out by 3rd September. Not sure why this should be, as most people already know it will be at the end of the year even if they are hazy on the exact date.

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It’s going to be an interesting end to the year. We start apple-pressing in early September with Doga on 19th September, World Porridge Day on 10th October, Apple Day on 24th, Turkey Tasting on 28th November and our Christmas Event (with wreath-making and Dickensian cliches) on 5th December. Add seven shoot days and a couple of events waiting for confirmation and it’s quite busy.

Then there’s Project Molish. It’s something to do with children and tools, so there’s not much to go wrong there is there?

Doga? Yes Doga. You bring your dog, do some yoga, have breakfast and then take the dogs for a walk. We’re at the forefront of novelty Yoga here, or the cutting edge of chaos if you consider the likely result of introducing a random collection of dogs to each other while the owners go “om”.

Apart from that we’ve held a discussion on the existence of Santa and whether Rudolph is a proper member of the reindeer team or a later addition, so it looks like I’m not the only one who is thinking ahead to Christmas.

We’ve also done a butterfly count that saw us able to record two Commas for the first time. We’ve had record numbers of Peacocks this year, far outnumbering the Small Tortoiseshells that were last year’s commonest sighting.

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Comma

Overall we’re up on last year in terms of variety, though it’s the moths that have made numbers up. It’s time to start planning new plants for next year’s Butterfly Garden and I’ve been pricing up alder buckthorn. It’s a good plant for Brimstones – a butterfly which we had last year but haven’t seen this year.

I’ve just spent twenty minutes outside looking at the Butterfly Garden. For most of the time the loudest noise I could hear was the buzzing of bumble bees. That’s unusual on a crowded island. It’s also a good argument for planting to attract pollinators. I even managed to spot a Mint Moth. They haven’t been as common this year as they were last, probably due to weather conditions, and it was good to see one, though slightly annoying I wasn’t doing a count at the time. They are very small and difficult to photograph – you could fit two or three on my thumb nail.

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Mint MOth

Strange really, I start by asking if it’s too soon to plan for4 Christmas and end up with plans for next summer already.

No wonder time goes quickly!