Bee Friendly Gardener

14/01/2025

My composting setup in an awkward garden corner. 1 & 2 - self-build 2m x 1.5 x 1.5 with plastic lumber with bottom hatch on both aspects. 2a - black 900 litre bin.
3. Black 240l 'Earthmaker' and black NZ multi-section "finishing" bin
4. 2 x 600l green GRAF Thermo-King.. 5 . One of my 3 leaf bins.
6. Rotasieve sieving station above 200l trug. Sieving is obviously a time-consuming personal choice but I am currently producing 8-10 200l trugs each year. The "turning" in my system happens as I move contents from bottom hatches to each next bin along each side of my setup starting from the big 'feeder' bin.
Rotasieve - for UK buyers, please support Stud House Products in Suffolk, the original UK supplier who is active again.
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/204241437647?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-127632-2357-0&ssspo=gIjK-QaDTWS&sssrc=4429486&ssuid=gIjK-QaDTWS&var=&widget_ver=artemis&media=EMAIL

13/01/2025

I am now on the Wildlife Garden Directory

Knowledgable and reliable gardener offering mainly regular chemical-free and organic maintenance of lawns,flower borders,hedges and small trees. Addit

12/01/2025

Recommended reading or listening. The author has done extensive research on the history of our battle with slugs and snails. Learn what may help you in your garden, Or listen to him on the Roots and All podcast,link below.
https://rootsandall.co.uk/podcast/slugs-and-snails/

01/01/2025

Join the Wildlife Gardening Forum - it is free and you will receive regular newsletters revealing the latest research relating to all things wildlife-friendly gardening !

06/12/2024

Gardening on the Other Side of the Fence -no. 22 (Eastry Village News - Dec 2024)
If you feel like you’ve been been gardening around wetter weather, you are right. I put a rain gauge into my garden in summer 2022 and posted recently on Eastry’s page that I had looked up the nearest official weather data which is collected at Manston airfield. The 1991-2020 yearly average rainfall is 612.64mm. In 2023 I collected 933.5mm and to the end of October 2024 we have had 787.5mm (v 629 in 2023). But this November has been dry at the time of writing whereas 2022 had 196mm and 2023 had 185.5mm.
The mild weather has meant that my dahlias and salvias are still in full flower and a small number of bumblebees are still active. Nationally it has been an especially quiet year for wasps and I have only observed two queens so far seeking a hibernation spot.
Some of you will have seen me mowing up leaves near the church. It collects and shreds them in a similar manner to a leaf vacuum and allows far more to be stored and means they will rot down quicker. It seems to be more popular in America to use the shredded leaves as a winter mulch. That may be because they tend to have larger plots. But there is now a big push to “Leave the leaves”. Many butterflies and moths lay their eggs on tree leaves and, if left on the ground as nature intended, these would then hatch out in the leaf litter. But this action competes with the general advice that leaving leaves will damage your lawn. I’m inclined to think this mainly applies to fine lawns. For many gardens it is likely to not have too much of an effect. I’m sure the type of leaf matters but an experiment in the US divided a lawn into sections and they left varying depths of leaves. Even those sections with a metre of leaves apparently survived the treatment. In the meantime, worms will drag the leaves into your soil, improving it and the local birds will have far more foraging opportunities. So don’t think you have to remove them all. Even moving them into your borders or under hedges and shrubs will benefit your soil. If you are throwing them all away you are throwing away free soil improver. Just one warning : If you are collecting roadside leaves – you may be picking unwanted detritus so err on the side of caution if the ultimate destination of your leaf mould is going onto your food-growing areas.
On the autumn gardening front, my organic bulb order is slightly late this year due to supply delays so I may end up planting those when it is colder. My seeds for next year have already arrived and my winter veg is in the ground (Winter Lettuce “Density”; Lamb’s Lettuce; Japanese Senshyu onions; shallots and Broad Beans).
It is coming up to 4 years in this garden, so Season Greetings and let’s hope for a bit more sunshine in 2025.
Jeff ‘the Bee-Friendly Gardener’

06/12/2024

Gardening on the Other Side of the Fence - no. 21 (Eastry Village News - Oct 2024)
A few chilly mornings have brought this year’s generally disappointing summer to a close and my gardening jobs list turns to emptying my leaf bins in readiness for this year’s fall. Depending on the type of leaf, they can be ready to use as a mulch around the garden after the first year but I tend to move them into bags ( the green garden sacks that we can no longer use are ideal ) for a further year. Much of this I will then sieve and add to my planting compost or use around the shadier, woodland plants and borders. And as a no-dig veg gardener I will also be mulching those areas with my own sieved home-made compost from November onwards as the ground becomes clear.
This is the second year that I have grown potatoes, in pots, solely in my own, sieved, compost and have been very pleased with the results. I have also extended this to tomatoes,aubergines and cucumbersin the greenhouse and all have cropped well.
After the cool start to the summer my bean crops finally caught up but both courgettes and sweetcorn have been a failure. Outdoor tomatoes are doing fine though.
Having written about insect declines last time, national media coverage did actually increase, partly because Jeremy Clarkson wrote on how quiet he found his farm this year. The lack of wasps has also been widely commented upon.
Myself and my wife were back on the plant stall at the Eastry fete again this year and I was able to make a decent donation of pollinator-friendly perennials as well a numerous trays of a heritage variety of Antirrinhum called ‘Black Prince’. These are never touched by slugs and snails. If some of you bought them, leave them in the ground, they should come back even stronger next year.
On the wildlife front, I have identified 23 new moth species this year. The overall numbers of moths have been lower this year but the species total is almost on a par with the past two years (120 v 124 and 129). The total garden list now stands at 208.
The number of active Swift nests in the church fell to 5 this year, down from 9 in 2023. And it has also been reported as a poor year for bats with higher than than usual numbers of young bats being found abandoned. We are back to poor number of insects again but the long cool early summer will take the blame this year. There are roosting bats at the church but I have seem them less this year foraging in my garden. There has been a bat survey carried out this year on Eastry Court Farm and six species were identified. The development of this site is in the offing so I will be interested in the implementation of “Biodiversity Net Gain” ( Some autumnal reading for you !). This has only come into law this year so this will be the first local example of this new flagship policy.
Jeff ‘the Bee-Friendly Gardener’

01/12/2024

Nature Books of the Year. Here is former RSPB boss Mark Avery's review of the year that I always use as a basis for my reading list.

This blog’s books of 2024. Mark December 1, 2024December 1, 2024 Leave a comment I have reviewed 52 books on this blog this year – a wide-ranging varied selection including many high quality works. If you are looking for a Christmas present for a nature-loving naturalist then this list might giv...

29/09/2024

Gardening on the Other Side of the Fence - no.20 (Eastry Village News, Aug/Sept 2024).
After a brief hot spell mentioned in the previous article, a rather middling sort of summer has taken hold. The regular light rain has kept the slugs and snails very active in my garden and it has been widely commented upon that this has been the worst for them for a good few years. We have used a combination of wool pellets and copper tape on our Hosta pots but it has made no difference. However, my other ‘litmus test’ is three dahlia plants in one of my raised veg beds. All the early growth was eaten until the short hot spell gave them some respite and now they are perfectly healthy and in full flower. I have had more trouble up on my young plant benches. Hungry molluscs often seem to develop an appetite for plants they never touch elsewhere, which I am sure is a combination of fresh,young growth and them being offered a much more spartan choice than in the garden itself.
More worrying to me, has been the almost complete lack of bees and other insects this year so far. It is being discussed extensively in wildlife and insect orientated magazines and online forums but a very busy news cycle has kept it out of the mainstream media. Every sort of recording is showing continually falling numbers of insects both here in the UK and around the world. The extensive use of pesticides both in farming and general use is the most widely accepted culprit as well as habitat loss and modern life’s more tidy approach to land management. There is an ongoing battle to get the general public to accept that longer grass on roadside verges and in parks etc is deliberate and beneficial. A large percentage of the food we eat is reliant on pollination by insects and only a doomsday scenario of food shortages or escalating prices will ever make this an issue worthy of mainstream political debate. Bird numbers in the UK have fallen by 44million since the 1990’s and even worms are now reported to have declined by 25%. This is why farmers are having their payment incentives altered and you will continue to hear more about regenerative agriculture, land owners and organisations like the National Trust are altering their management regimes and homeowners are being asked to adopt “no-dig” practices and be less tidy in their own gardens. A combination of these are hoped to be the way forward, as demonstrated by the most famous example in the UK - the Knepp Estate in Sussex where numbers of rare birds and butterflies have continued to grow as this former arable and dairy farm undergoes its transformation. Look out for the recently released documentary film “Wilding” which tells its story. We are having successes here in the UK reintroducing many birds and mammals but it is the bottom of the food chain which will ultimately determine the fate of our wider countryside.
Jeff ‘the Bee-Friendly Gardener’

29/09/2024

I had forgotten to post the last couple of village magazine articles. "Gardening on the Other Side of the Fence - no.19 (Eastry Village News Jun/Jul 2024.
I write just as the weather has really warmed up. I have gone from moaning about the cool weather making a lot of the early veg sowings mope, to it now being so hot in the greenhouse and losing some seedlings to the heat. My greenhouse location is a lot warmer than at my previous garden and I am still learning to cope. I have some shade netting on the south-east facing side but feel that I need to increase the area covered.
We have had excellent displays of tulips and early clematis and some late January purchased daffodils that I wrote about previously, flowered perfectly. Changes in the meadow included only 3 cowslips flowering after there were 14 in 2023. They obviously react to the weather as they barely showed in 2022 either. and from the large colony of 100 Camassia Quamash also only produced 3 flowers with the rest coming up blind. As we have had such a damp spell over the last 18 months, I am rather perplexed as to what has caused this. This is the 4th spring that has had Yellow Rattle growing, and being an annual, you are reliant on the weather to getting this hemi-parasite established but this year the population has exploded so as this weakens the stronger meadow grasses I look forward to other flowers being able to get a foothold.
My Snakeshead Fritillary colony has increased from 29 to 54 flowers in 4 years. There are lots of seedlings this year which the damp weather has influenced. They flowered 10 days earlier than 2023.
On the wildlife front, we had 5 clumps of frogspawn this year (8 days earlier than 2023) but the tadpoles disappeared very quickly, not to birds this year as I covered the pond in mesh and neither did we find any newts. I don’t know if dragonfly nymphs can be responsible for such heavy losses.
It has been a relatively quiet winter for birds with a much smaller range visiting than last year.
Now that the garden waste collections have changed to bins and if you have green sacks lying around, perhaps make this autumn the year to collect leaves to make leaf mould. Or ask your gardening neighbours if they would like them as I find them the ideal size for storing good quantities. The wet winter has certainly speeded up their decomposition this year – the type of leaves usually determines how quickly you have free usable soil improver.
Also on the green gardening front, B&Q have announced, in the last week, that 100 of their stores will be taking plastic plant pots for recycling. Black pots have been an issue for recycling as the materials scanners can’t see black. Even though the industry swapped to beige and grey pots, very few local authorties allow them to be put in home recycle bins. I have yet to establish whether the Dover branch will be participating.
Jeff ‘the Bee-Friendly Gardener’

31/05/2024

Here is a plant supplier I can recommend. Use code FREEDELIVERY for orders over £15 until Sunday

Specialist plant nursery selling plants to attract bees and other pollinators. Peat-free, pesticide-free. Carefully researched.

27/04/2024

A bit tired now but an impressive bee hotel at Godinton House gardens nr Ashford, Kent

14/02/2024

Gardening on the Other Side of the Fence - no. 17 (Eastry Village News, Jan/Feb 2024)
Cold, early January and the gardening season is still only on the horizon. However as part of my resolution to increase the amount of bulbs in the garden I have two options in the pipeline. As mentioned before I am endeavouring to only plant organic bulbs. I have found another UK based supplier (www.organicgardener.co.uk, a Dutch grower who has relocated to Devon) and will be planting a batch of tulip bulbs, just received, later today. There are plenty of bulb buying bargains to be had in the latter part of the year and while you have less choice, the savings are substantial. Tulips are usually recommended to be planted later than other bulbs in order to reduce the risk of the tulip fire virus and plenty of growers report that they flower perfectly well from January plantings.
Some other bulbs establish best from being planted “in the green”, which is when they are in active growth. Snowdrops are most often recommended for this method but suppliers offer plenty of other choices. I have just ordered 100 of our native, wild daffodil (Narcissus pseudonarcissus) (from www.naturescape.co.uk). I expect these to be delivered in February. I had previously ordered these from another supplier in autumn 2021,but they turned out to have sent the wrong variety. I ignored this in 2022 but sent I photographic evidence in 2023 and received a full refund. As they were individually planted in my orchard meadow, I have no urge to dig them up again. Fortunately they are still a quite discreet flowered daff, not one of the big boisterous yellow varieties.
One tool purchase has transformed bulb planting and will help save my ageing wrists from the rigours of this task : an awl attachment for an electric drill. I like to avoid the use of power tools as much as possible but this really has been a game-changer for large-scale planting.
The tulips are going into a small gap between a raised veg bed that sits in front of my greenhouse. Last year this was planted with sunflowers with the bonus of having somewhere easy to tie them to for support and I will repeat that again. After the bulbs go in, I will be mulching with shredded apple tree prunings, both for w**d suppression and soil enhancement. I urge you to look up the work of a pioneer regenerative agriculture farmer, Iain Tolhurst. Experimentation with the use of wood chips and the results so far achieved have turned them from a waste product into a revenue earner for many tree surgeons. The last addition has been a dwarf Narcissus, ‘W.P. Milner’ but these were dry bulbs and may not flower this year as Narcissus start rooting in September and flowering can be determined by the amount of rainfall in that period.
I was away for both the Village fete and the last Safari in 2023, buto I will be growing pollinator-friendly plants for both this year. I look forward to saying hello to some of you then.
Jeff, the Bee Friendly Gardener.

08/12/2023

Gardening on the Other Side of the Fence - no.16 (Eastry Village News, Dec 2023)
This article coincides with our third anniversary in Eastry and a chance to look back at events in my garden in 2023. There have been no structural changes to the garden this year and just two significant additions to the planting to the mini-orchard– a Concord Pear and a Black Mulberry.
The ground cover comfreys and Sweet Violets have established well under the fruit trees and provided a lot of extra pollen and habitat.
In the meadow, there was an increased amount of Yellow Rattle and Wild Carrot and Ox-eye daisy flowered for the first time. I have added more Ox-eyes and Birdsfoot Trefoil. I saw more grasshoppers in other gardens than I have ever seen but only a few in my own. As a wildlife meadow rather than a hay meadow I didn’t cut until late September and until mid October in sections but the generous rainfall this summer produced twice as much material for the compost heap than last year.
Additions to the perennial planting around the garden included Jacob’s Ladders (Polemonium caeruleum); Campanula lactifoila; Geranium phaeum and Rozanne; Astrantia ‘Roma’ and Betony. All of these are good for pollinators. Aside from the early dry spell, new plantings didn’t require too much watering this year. After an extremely slow start to the year for bees, the variety seemed good but numbers of bumblebees stayed much lower than usual. Experts are putting it down to the high temperatures last year.
There were two new species to add to the garden bird list – a Grey Heron landed in our Cherry Plum tree, I suspect prospecting either my pond or a neighbour’s fish pond and a group of Chiffchaff hung around for a few days at the end of August.
I mentioned in an earlier article that the first Smooth Newt was seen in the pond but I was pleased to find our first toad when emptying my leaf mould cage in September. About ten days later I found what I assume was the same one down the drain of our driveway gutter so I have plugged this with wire mesh to prevent a repeat. A neighbour also saw their first toad in four years so hopefully they are establishing in our locality.
I have identified a further 40 moths this year, with the garden list now at 182 species. My total counts were skewed upwards by large numbers of Boxtree moths which explains everyone’s box shrubs being eaten this year. However when we visited Lyme Regis in September there was no damage to the plants we saw there. As an example of how moth species vary through the season and years, a moth called a Green Oak Tortrix which I hadn’t seen in 2021 or 22, had a trap count of 132 on the 10th June but zero 2 weeks either side. You will often read how birds time their breeding to coincide with insects and this may well be an example of how specific that needs to be for a particular food source to be available. Here’s looking forward to a new gardening year in 2024.
Jeff, the Bee Friendly Gardener.

01/10/2023

Gardening on the Other Side of the Fence - no 15. Eastry Village News Oct/Nov 2023.
My wildlife-friendly approach to gardening has had increased media coverage this summer following comments by Alan Titchmarsh and Monty Don regarding the current trend for garden ‘rewilding’. After 2022’s Chelsea Flower Show’s winning garden was rewilding themed and this year’s show promoted the use of wildflowers, both of the UK’s highest profile TV gardeners were quoted as to being worried that this trend would lead to a decline in traditional gardening skills and Mr Titchmarsh has even been in the House of Lords discussing the issue.
Firstly, rewilding as a concept has nothing to do with gardening but the term has now been widely adopted by the media and many organisations to promote nature-friendly practices in many different fields. The reintroduction of lost species, whether it be storks or beavers used to be called ‘species reintroductions’(!). But they are reported as rewilding. Rewilding as it was originally coined in the 1990’s, in the USA, was to do with the restoration of wildlands and ecosystems. Wolves in Yellowstone park is the most well known example where their presence has altered the wider landscape and many other species have benefitted. American scientists are mildly critical of the European approach where the main practice is the introduction of more domesticated animals in farmland landscapes that then replicate the grazing of previously wild herds of cattle or horses. Being in Kent, hopefully you will have heard of the experiment in Blean Woods using European Bison to see what impact they have compared to the use of Longhorn Cattle or Exmoor ponies.
But on the home front,a more varied approach to the way you garden can hugely increase its biodiversity. Neatly edged lawns and traditional plants can still sit alongside less highly managed areas. Leaving plants stems late in autumn and winter, or providing piles of leaves ,sticks or twigs, which can be done neatly (or even in metal gabions) are the little touches that make the difference.
It is not necessarily lower maintenance or completely hands-off which the media tend to exaggerate.
Meanwhile every one of my customers who has Box plants or hedges have seen them completely defoliated this summer by Boxworm moth caterpillars. As ugly as it looks, they will not have killed your plants. They will regrow. However it may happen every year and you may decide you’d rather remove them and replace them with something else. This moth arrived from Asia in the UK in early 2000’s. Gardeners who wont resort to chemicals have reported success with hosing off the caterpillars or hand-picking. There are also anecdotal reports that robins and blue t**s are starting to eat them. Apparently they have a bitter taste and it may take a while for more birds to get used to them.
I have yet to see an Asian Hornet but nests in Kent have been found this year so please learn to identify them.
Jeff, the Bee Friendly Gardener

30/07/2023

Gardening on the Other Side of the Fence - no. 14 - Eastry Village News Jul/Aug 2023.
Here we are in July and fortunately the dry spell we had from May 12th to June 17th is almost a distant memory. It was very early in the year to be suffering yellowing lawns but they have already recovered despite June going on to be the warmest recorded since 1940. As I don’t heat my greenhouse some of the early year veg sowings really struggled with the cold spring but it didn’t hamper hardy annual and perennial flowers. I have been taking part in the project restoring the flower beds along the Rope Walk in Sandwich and have being growing plants for that. The challenge for the more local participants had been keeping the new plantings watered. In the veg garden I am experimenting with growing potatoes and lettuces in pots purely in my own home made compost and the results are looking very promising. I also grow strawberries in plastic hanging baskets and I had the best fruiting this year after refreshing them with Vermicompost which is the output from a wormery. As a dedicated ‘green’ gardener, composting is the only soil amendment that I make on the ground but my composting is enriched by the liquid from my wormery as well as three other inputs – namely Comfrey liquid from rotted down leaves; nettle feed from water-soaked leaves and liquid from my w**d-drowning bucket where I put any roots of bindw**d, dandelions and docks etc. These deep-rooted w**ds pull up minerals from the subsoil and make a great addition to your garden. The last major components are generous additions of wood ash and shredded cardboard. Admittedly, I do sometimes feel I spend more time composting than elsewhere in the garden. But if you consider the amount of time, expense and fuel that is expended getting rid of garden waste it really is one of the most planet-friendly changes you can make in your garden. Also the amount of plastic required to support gardening, whether it be pots, bags or w**d and feed bottles are other areas that require dedication in order to avoid. I can recommend a nursery in Faversham called Edibleculture for anyone seeking to reduce their gardening footprint.
Following the disappointment of losing all of our first tadpoles to various predators, I am pleased to have seen the first emergent dragonfly from this pond. It was a female Southern Hawker which lays its eggs on damp wood which I witnessed in the summer of 2021 just after the pond had been created so it was nice to see the cycle completed. Despite the continued lack of bees in any significant numbers, I have seen an upsurge in visiting hoverflies which are the dominant pollinator at the moment and I have also been catching moths in larger numbers than the same time last year. My garden moth list has now risen to 169 species.
Jeff ,the Bee Friendly Gardener.

14/07/2023

Wildflower of the Week : Betony (Betonica officianalis). A great addition to any flower border,neat habit and attracts Wool Carder bees. There are even a couple of "garden bred varieties" that are available.