Tag Archives: allotment

Flowers, sunshine, showers

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The busy days of early spring and lambing have been followed by the equally busy months of April, May and early June, with my outdoor learning work filling most of my time. Despite our Arctic spring (courtesy of the jet stream’s wanderings), the seasons have been ever so slowly inching forwards, and although today is grey and rainy there are signs that we may have more of a summer this year than in 2012. Here’s hoping!

Most unusually, we did have a sunny and warm Bank Holiday Monday in early May. This was a great relief, as on the day I was paddling a home-made raft with a team of other volunteers down the Kennet and Avon Canal, taking part in the Crafty Craft Race to raise funds for Five A Day Market Garden where I work and volunteer. We paddlers worked in shifts to propel our catamaran-like craft the five miles eastwards from Kintbury to Newbury: you can see from the photo below that a fun time was had by all! (I’m the one paddling at the rear of the craft, in case you were wondering.)

Astonishingly, our ‘Ghostbusters’ team (hence the ‘spooky’ facepainting) won the race in our category! I put it down to all of us Five A Day Market garden volunteers getting lots of healthy exercise and fresh organic fruit and veg. (Plus having a superbly engineered craft, designed and built from an old swimming pool cover by Ghostbusters team member Dennis – kudos to him.)

Before the early May Bank Holiday weekend, warm days were rare enough that when they showed up I tried to get out to enjoy them as often as possible. One sunny weekend in late April I went out to see what spring flowers were in bloom, and discovered the most phenomenal bank of Cowslips Primula veris near Speen, thousands of plants in full flower.

Walking around Snelsmore Common the same weekend, I was struck by how many plants had been brought into simultaneous flowering by the warmth, after so many weeks of unrelenting cold. In Withy Copse, Wood Anemones Anemone nemorosa and Lesser Celandines Ranunculus ficaria were flowering together, starring the ground with white and gold. The large purple-blotched arrowhead leaves of Cuckoopint Arum maculatum were everywhere, while just the leaves of Bluebells Endymion nonscriptus were showing.

The trees were only just showing signs of waking up, with few buds opening to release the tips of new leaves, so there was still plenty of light reaching the ground layer where these fabulous woodland flora grow. In another woodland (Briff’s Copse near Hamstead Marshall) I found Moschatel Adoxa moschatellina, a diminuitive little plant that’s always been one of my favourites. Moschatel comes from the Greek word for musk, as the plant has a somewhat musky smell; its other common name is Town Hall Clock, so called because the five-sided flower is said to resemble the faces on a clock-tower.

Of course with the spring and summer flowers opening, there is finally some nectar and pollen for insects to find. With last year being such a dismal one for British butterflies, it’s even more pleasing than usual to see them on the wing on sunny days. I spotted this Peacock butterfly basking at Snelsmore Common in late April, before it swooped off at high speed as all the Vanessid butterflies seem to do.

Snelsmore Common was also the site for a singing picnic that I organised for local choir Sing The World, which I co-lead with my friend Tessa. We gathered down there on 3rd June to share food and drink, followed by an hour or so of harmony singing as the sun slowly set. A grand way to spend an evening, in my opinion. I love the way that singing unites people of all backgrounds and ages, there’s nothing quite like it. Currently I’m just starting to plan songs for my next singing workshop, which will be on 19th October at the lovely barn conference centre at Elm Farm Organic Research Centre near Newbury. I’m looking forward to it already!

With last year’s challenging weather it was nice to hear some good news about local wildlife conservation: the success of BBOWT’s Heritage Lottery Fund bid for the five-year Linking The Landscape project in West Berkshire. I attended a conference in mid-April organised by BBOWT, at which they were celebrating the previous five years’ conservation work done by BBOWT and West Berkshire Council on the local areas covered by the Living Landscape scheme. I had been involved both as a volunteer and as a freelance consultant in the Living Landscape scheme and the new funding bid, so I was very happy to hear the great news that all the sterling conservation work done so far by volunteers and professionals alike will not only be safeguarded but extended, for the benefit of local wildlife and local people.

The conference itself was an interesting day, with a fascinating speech on landscape-scale conservation projects across the UK by ecologist and Head of Planning and Environment for Forest Enterprise England, Jonathan Spencer. One of his points was that landscapes and wildlife are best protected when conservation is integrated with community needs, including economic needs – and vice versa. This is a message that I think many people, both environmentalists and developers, are still struggling to come to terms with. There’s often a sense in this crowded country of battle lines being drawn up, when actually it would make far more sense for conservationists, businesses and local communities to work together to develop ways of managing our land that allow for sustainable living and plenty of space for wildlife. Good food for thought!

During the afternoon of the conference we had the chance to take part in some workshops on a range of different topics: amongst other things I participated in a training session for monitoring the effects of grazing regimes on the heathlands and grasslands of the commons, with West Berkshire ranger Adrian Wallington and ecologist Thomas Haynes. The aim of this is to recruit volunteers to carry out simple plant surveys to help monitor the effects of the livestock grazing on vegetation on the commons, hopefully to improve management for all kinds of wildlife. What better way to spend an hour two on a sunny summer’s day, than sitting in the sunshine looking at flowers? If you agree, why not get involved by getting in touch with Adrian Wallington and asking him for more info.

Another highlight in April was going on a camp with Thatcham Young Rangers to Rushall Farm, in the Easter holidays. As the weather leading up to our camp had been pretty miserable, we kept our fingers crossed… And luckily, we were blessed with more or less dry days! The Young Rangers were total stars: most of them had never camped or slept away from home before, but they all mucked in and had a great time. We visited the farm animals, helped migrating toads reach their pond, built bivouacs in the woods, and sang so loudly round our campfire that they probably heard us in Reading! Because of the very cold night the kids pitched their tents inside the farm’s 300-year-old Black Barn, bedding down amidst much giggling. All of us adult helpers involved received beautiful handmade Thank You cards signed by every child, with the fervent request “Pleeeeeeease can we come and camp here again next year?”

We are now in the heart of the school visit season at Rushall Farm, with the field teaching team working at the farm most days of the week. In mid-May one of my fellow field teachers found some Early Purple Orchids Orchis mascula in Oaklands Copse at the farm, and was kind enough to tell me about them. Their spotted leaves had evidently been nibbled by deer or rabbits, but the pink flowers themselves had survived: a lovely sight amongst the trees.

Schools have also been coming to Five A Day Market Garden: Castleview School from Slough brought three classes of pupils on visits, which were great fun for children and adults alike. Not fazed by the showery weather, the staff and pupils got stuck into sensory and gardening activities, finally making three fabulous scarecrows, one of which is pictured here. The school brought a really positive and creative attitude with them that made working with their groups a total pleasure: I look forward to seeing them at Five A Day again next year!

On the gardening front, things are finally starting to get going on the allotment that I share with my friend Tessa. The rise in temperatures brought our strawberry plants into flower, which in turn brought out the honey bees from the hives in the corner of the allotment site. We’re hoping that this will be a better year for veg growing, as last year was pretty much a wash-out. So far the signs are promising: we’ve enjoyed our first crop of asparagus since creating our asparagus bed three years ago, our broad beans and sugarsnap peas are coming on a treat, and we finished off the last edible bits of last year’s brussels sprouts: the tender green tops and yellow flowers, which I discovered tasted jolly nice when incorporated into a sweet potato and feta salad.

As part of a planned new housing development, our allotments at Speen are threatened with possible relocation to a new site only 30 metres from the Newbury Bypass. Allotment members and the local community are currently being consulted about the proposals, with a public exhibition of plans for the suggested development at Speen Hall on 19th June. My feeling is that I support the provision of new social housing (of which some 40% of the proposed development is supposed to be), but no way do I want to be gardening on the edge of the bypass. Hopefully an alternative site for the allotments will be found which matches the peaceful current setting… Otherwise I may have to dust off my direct action techniques and dig out my D-lock! The plans are very much at the early consultation stage, so hopefully the feedback from allotment holders and others will produce a better solution for all concerned.

At least the slow start to the growing season this year has meant that I haven’t had to spend all my free time weeding the allotment, so I’ve been able to go out exploring for more wildlife. On a trip with the Young Rangers group to Padworth Common local nature reserve in late May, we were surprised to find a glowworm larva sitting on the edge of one of the corrugated iron sheets used as refuges by reptiles on the site.

Glowworms are actually a type of beetle: the adult females have two brightly-glowing segments on the underside of their rear abdomen, which they use to attract the flying male beetles on summer evenings. They feed on tiny snails and although said to prefer chalky or limestone soils can be recorded anywhere with suitable habitat: open vegetation such as grassland or hedges. The peak for finding glowing females is usually July, so why not have a look at a few sites in your locality and see if you can find some.

Staying with the theme of nocturnal and crepuscular wildlife, at the end of May I went on a bat monitoring and moth trapping evening organised by BBOWT and Berks and South Bucks Bat Group, on the southern side of Greenham Common. As the evening was mild (and teeming with midges and mosquitoes!) we were hoping for some good numbers of bats, but alas all the bat nest boxes we checked were empty and there were few calls picked up by our bat detectors. We were lucky enough to catch a couple of Pipistrelle bats in the mist nets set up by James Shipman and other BSBBG volunteers. These tiny bats can each consume up to 3,000 insects in a single night! After spending several hours being bitten despite liberal amounts of insect repellent, I was silently wishing the Pipistrelles good hunting.

The bat action being less than stellar, I joined the moth trappers for a few hours of identifying the various moths and other night-time insects lured in by the lamps and white sheets placed around the common. I love moth trapping: there’s something quintessentially English about sitting in the dark peering at moth identification books and fluttering beasties in bug pots, periodically bombarded by bemused cockchafer beetles. I’ve yet to meet a moth enthusiast who isn’t also a thoroughly nice person. Enthusiasm is infectious, and frankly I find the geekiness of entomologists rather loveable. I’m well aware that this qualifies me for geekdom myself: it’s an identity I happily embrace, along with my many other guises. Oh, and moth trappers always make sure that good biscuits are conveniently to hand, as you can see on the left-hand edge of white sheet.

In early June I went on a dragonfly and damselfly identification course, one of the many Developing Your Skills workshops that BBOWT run across Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire. If you volunteer for BBOWT these courses are free of charge, but even if you pay, at £30.00 these courses are excellent value for money. This particular day was led by local ecology consultant Adrian Hickman, a very knowledgeable naturalist who can communicate what he knows in a clear and accessible way. Adrian’s morning classroom sessions focussing on identification features were reinforced by an afternoon fieldwork session on ponds around Greenham Common. And once again the sun was shining, so we had good amounts of sightings of Broad-bodied Chasers, Emperor Dragonflies, Large Red Damselflies (pictured above) and Azure Damselflies to name a few.

I’m looking forward to a summer of exploring nature and putting some of my newly-acquired skills to use: but one of the perks of working in environmental teaching is that even when I’m at work I get lots of opportunities to notice and appreciate the natural world. Recently I’ve started giving illustrated talks to groups, about subjects including wildlife gardening, foraging for wild foods and environmental education. It’s a genuine pleasure to be able to share my enthusiasm for the natural world with even more people, adults and children alike. A love of wildlife is catching, but unlike other infectious things, it’s really good for you! It’s good to see the BBC promoting their Summer of Wildlife, which will hopefully get more people turned on to nature in their own locality. I’ll certainly be out there: peering at moths, sniffing plants, studying dragonflies. However you plan to spend your summer, I hope you enjoy it too.

Wood anemones at Snelsmore Common

 

Three months later…

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If the title of this blog entry seems a trifle enigmatic, let me dispell the mystery: it’s been three months since I last wrote a blog entry. Lawks! How did that happen?

Well it happened, of course, because I’ve been a tad busy. All good stuff, many adventures and projects and work-related developments, but for several weeks other things (including this blog) have had to take a back seat for a while. The allotment that I share with my friend Tessa has also been somewhat neglected, or at least hasn’t received the kind of TLC that we were both able to give it the previous year. To be fair, the rather moist summer we’ve had has meant finding a spare half day to work on our plot when it hasn’t been siling down with rain has been virtually impossible. It’s also meant that an awful lot of veg that we planted did not do well: broad bean plants rotted and died, salads were a disaster area, peas were decimated by pigeons, even courgettes (which we’re usually reduced to putting in carrier bags and leaving anonymously on people’s doorsteps) fell prey to the slugfest that has been this year’s growing season. The only things that did well were our asparagus, Festival squash (pictured above) and some O’Driscoll drying beans (pictured below). These last are a Heritage Seed Library variety that grows like a runner bean, and is picked in late autumn, giving oodles of pleasingly white and purple speckled little round beans that I’m looking forward to eating. I grew mine from a few seeds donated by a kind friend.

 With all the rainy weather I resorted to growing a few things on the windowsills of my flat (which helpfully face due south), including the biggest basil leaves I’ve ever seen in my life and a crop of ‘Apache’ chillies that are so spicy they are probably contributing to global warming. I am a chilliholic (I used to eat the ones that came pickled in jars of vinegar, then drink the vinegar) but these have given me a new respect for chilli-dom. They apparently score 75,000 – 80,000 on the Scoville Scale of chilli hotness: to give you some context, jalapeño chillies score about 2,500 – 8,000 on the Scoville Scale. I’m not sure whether to cook with the Apaches or stockpile them as lethal weapons.

Work has been full-on pretty much all summer and into the autumn, apart from a week off in early August to go to Voice Camp (of which more in a later blog). Despite the adverse weather conditions it’s been a good year so far for field teaching. I’ve especially enjoyed doing some Forest School sessions with the Thatcham Young Rangers youth group I co-lead. The Forest School ethos is that activities are hands-on and largely child-led: we leaders gave instruction in safe and correct tool use, establish some ground rules… Then let the kids choose their own activities. We’ve had den building, fire lighting, stick whittling, tree climbing – in fact, pretty much everything I used to do as a kid, but which most children today are usually not allowed to do. Even just getting messy was a novelty for some of them – though they soon got the hang of it, especially when they discovered how to make facepaints from elderberries and mud!

It’s been great being so busy, but because I’ve been teaching on Saturdays as well (running some wildlife gardening courses for adults) I have missed having weekends to go exploring. Last Saturday was free and I took advantage of the mild autumn weather to go on a yomp around  Combe, a few miles southwest of Newbury. Amazingly I didn’t see a soul during the three-hour walk. I started high up on Walbury Hill, where the gorse and brambles lining the track were hung with cobwebs silvered with mist.

It was a perfect day for walking, cool and bright and still. There is something about being high up on hills and ridgelines that is wonderfully exhilarating. You’re about as far away from the sea as you can get in Berkshire, but there is something of the feel of the coast when you’re high up on the downs. It got me thinking about cliffs and the sea as I walked along… Maybe next year I will do some of the South West Coast Path when I’ve got a long weekend or a week free. In the meantime I was happy to be striding out over the hills, enjoying the autumn colours that are starting to show spectacularly in woodlands and hedgerows.

I know from my teaching at Rushall Farm that it’s been as tough a year for farmers as it has been for veg growers, so I was interested to see in one field a straggly crop of maize, interspersed with dense drifts of Scented mayweed Matricaria recutita. I wondered for a moment what kind of maize crop would have been gathered in after the cold wet summer – until I remember that maize is commonly grown as a cover crop on land where pheasant shoots take place. The mayweed was pretty, anyway.

My guess about pheasants proved correct. Once I cut into the woodland, the wretched things kept exploding from the undergrowth like demented banshees. It’s a mystery to me why pheasants sit quietly until they’re almost underfoot, whereupon they burst out in a flurry of scolding clucking and whirring feathers that causes any passer-by to suffer near cardiac arrest. I haven’t eaten pheasant for many years (although my maternal grandpa was a bit of a dab hand at poaching, family lore has it) but by the time I’d walked through the small woodland I would’ve quite cheerfully stuffed a few into an oven. The phrase “too stupid to live” kept coming irresistibly to mind. I know it’s not the pheasants’ fault that they’re here in such vast amounts in our countryside, and they are strikingly handsome birds… But boy, are they dumb. Maybe they have to be, for the purpose of pheasant shoots. I could be wrong, but I suspect that the average toff who goes pheasant shooting (and at a cost of around £1,000 per day, I’m guessing that most of the participants are toffs) prefers his flying targets not to be too quick-witted.

If I sound a bit jaundiced it’s because I am. It’s tricky; I work a lot in rural areas where being anti blood sports is not well looked upon, but it’s the ‘sport’ element of it that I dislike. I’d rather people shot and ate deer, if they have to shoot anything. We could certainly do with a lot less of those around, and in the absence of wolves I guess we could fill that ‘top carnivore’ niche. I don’t object to people knocking off pheasants and eating them per se. It’s the whole industry of it that bothers me – that and the way some gamekeepers and landowners see pheasants as privileged creatures to be protected at all costs, even if that means destroying actual native British wildlife. Our local MP and Minister for Wildlife and Biodiversity Richard Benyon controversially tried to introduce a programme for Defra to fund the capture of buzzards and destruction of their nests. Fortunately the resultant uproar from conservationists – not least because the proposed scheme was based on anecdotes of pheasant chick predation rather than any kind of scientific evidence – forced the government to back down. Or as Richard Benyon put it, “In the light of the public concerns expressed in recent days, I have decided to look at developing new research proposals on buzzards.” Mmm.

Buzzards are actually commoner than they used to be, largely thanks to the successful reintroduction of red kites (one pictured above) into England. A lot of work was done with landowners and gamekeepers to prevent the newly introduced kites from being shot or poisoned, with the result that buzzards have also benefited. I’m really glad that these large birds of prey are making a comeback: my heart never fails to lift when I see them wheeling and soaring over freshly-ploughed fields at Rushall Farm. And towards the end of my walk around Combe there were a few red kites circling above me, riding the air currents over the downs… A fitting end to a good day’s walking.

 Speaking of Rushall Farm, I had a particularly pleasing moth moment there at the end of a field teaching day this week. I had just finished cleaning the toilets (the glamour of working in outdoor education!) and spotted a very spanking Merveille Du Jour moth sitting on the toilet door. This moth’s name translates as ‘Marvel of the Day’, and it pretty much was. It feeds on oak Quercus spp., of which there is a good amount at Rushall thanks to the well-managed semi-natural ancient woodlands on the farm. All supported by funding such as the Higher Level Stewardship scheme which Rushall succeeded in gaining this year: a good example of how farming can benefit the environment and wildlife.

This weekend has started clear and cold and sunny, so I made the most of yet another free Saturday to stomp around Snelsmore Common for a couple of hours. The wind was bitter but the woods were looking fabulous: full autumn colours and drifts of leaves bowling around in the gusts. I found an Amethyst Deceiver Laccaria amethystina among the beech leaves, looking like it had been put there by a set designer. Fungi are the coolest things: they recycle dead leaves and wood, and many form dense networks of underground root-like hyphae which grow in close association with the roots of trees and other plants, benefiting them enormously. Fungal hyphae are tiny: in one gram of woodland soil there can be an astonishing 100 metres of hyphae… Yet the largest (and oldest) living thing in the world is a fungus: Armillarea ostoyae (Honey fungus to you and me) in the Blue Mountains in Oregon, one specimen of which has hyphae covering 965 hectares. Epic. How can you not like fungi? Especially as when they do pop their fruiting bodies up above ground or out of logs, as the familiar toadstools or mushrooms we’ve all encountered, they manifest in such a funky range of shapes and colours.

Autumn being the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, the other good reason to walk through the woods at Snelsmore Common was to glean the ground underneath the many Sweet chestnut trees Castanea sativa that grow there. I was half expecting the squirrels to have got there first, but there were actually lots of nuts to find, especially when I rootled about under the thick litter of orange-brown leaves lying on the ground. I’m not sure yet how I’ll cook ’em up – maybe something involving mushrooms, which go well with sweet chestnuts’ rich earthy sweetness. Or possibly brussels sprouts, although it’ll be a while yet before ours will be ready on our allotment. Maybe I can cook and freeze the chestnuts in the meantime…

So by coming back to allotments and food, I’ve come full circle. Must be all this healthy outdoor walking giving me an appetite. My Festival squash are sitting cheerfully in a corner of my kitchen, from where I regularly choose one to roast or stew. I won’t be carving one for Hallowe’en, because they’re just too yummy to waste as lanterns… Though I might carve an ordinary pumpkin anyway, for a bit of fun. I’m looking forward to Hallowe’en – or Samhain, the old Celtic new year, as I celebrate it. In the half term holiday week I’ll be running some ‘Creepy Crafty Creatures’ family events at Five A Day Market Garden which will focus on bats, owls, spiders and other spooky wildlife; plus another wildlife gardening course for adults, so I’ll be keeping busy. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with a photograph of a very gorgeous creepy creature found on our allotment this summer: a beautiful toad who’d made herself at home catching the slugs feasting on our strawberries.

Happy Hallowe’en for next week!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Whatever the weather

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I write this on a grey, showery first day of July, after what has been a largely grey, rainy June. It feels cool and windy and not at all like midsummer should be: working outdoors almost every day as I do, I feel slightly more entitled to whinge about the inclement weather than most folks. And reminding myself that “we need the rain” doesn’t actually help much. At the end of the day, I would prefer to be field teaching without having to garb myself up like a North Sea fisherman. Not to mention that 75% of the schoolchildren who turn up on field trips appear to be offspring of parents who haven’t had the nouse to put the words “outdoors” and “suitable clothing” together in their overtaxed brains. Here’s a clue, folks: in the real world coats have to be waterproof. All the Hello Kitty accessories in the world will not comfort your child if they are soaked to the skin on a five-hour school trip in the countryside.

If I sound a tad grumpy it’s because I’m not well: after being surrounded by schoolkids barking out coughs like sealions for the past month, I’ve succumbed to a tenacious virus that has left me teaching in a sultry croak that occasionally frightens younger children. Taking days off sick when you’re self employed is not really an option unless you have pneumonia, so I’m consuming epic quantities of garlic and fresh lemons and fortifying myself with echinacea and paracetamol. Being able to teach in dry weather would be helpful but the latest forecast seems to be continuing on the moist side… Heigh ho. Waterproofs at the ready.

In an effort to cheer myself up I’m posting some photos taken in late May and early June, before Britain entered the Rain Age. My friend Chris led a walk at Hartslock Nature Reserve near Goring, for Reading and District Natural History Society (RDNHS). It was a scorchingly hot day, and a lovely opportunity to revisit a nature reserve where I once lived for a few months in a caravan as the resident warden ‘guarding’ a colony of Monkey orchids (Orchis simia). The photo at the start of this blog is of Hartslock Woods, looking east down the River Thames. If you don’t know this site (which is owned and managed by local wildlife trust BBOWT) then I highly recommend you visit it: it’s fabulous for plants, invertebrates, birds and commands views over the Thames Valley and Goring Gap second to none.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

RDNHS was founded in 1881 and is still going strong: the group runs a programme of outdoor visits to sites of wildlife interest and indoor talks about subjects ranging from earthworms to bird conservation in Ecuador. I don’t get along to their meetings as often as I’d like (especially at the moment, as I’m teaching six days a week and several evenings too), but I can thoroughly recommend them. Not only do you get a fascinating look at the natural world, but you meet some phenomenally accomplished amateur and professional naturalists who will generously share their knowledge with you. A list of their upcoming outdoor trips (on midweek evenings as well as Saturdays and Sundays) can be found on their website.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Monkey orchid (Orchis simia) pictured in close-up above is one plant that gives Hartslock its botanical cachet. In 2002 a Lady orchid (Orchis purpurea) flowered at the site, and by 2006 the first Monkey-Lady hybrid Orchis simia x purpurea was seen in flower on the reserve. Now there is a thriving colony of 250+ hybrids alongside the existing Monkey orchids on the main orchid slope, and there has (and continues to be) lively debate about the pros and cons of hybridisation. My take on it is that ‘hybrid vigour’ (check out the sturdier-looking hybrid plant below) may well prove to be a healthy thing for the Monkey orchids long term… And that Mother Nature generally knows best and gets on with sorting things out, regardless of what opinions we puny humans may have. For more background info on the science behind the hybrids, check out Chris’s Hartslock website.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Being an unimproved chalk downland reserve, Hartslock is generally fantastic not just for orchids but all kinds of plant species. There is a small colony of (introduced) Pasqueflower Pulsatilla vulgaris, of which one was still in bloom in late May.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Another notable at Hartslock is the semi-parasitic Bastard toadflax Thesium humifusum, a tiny creeping little plant that taps into the roots of other plants and derives some of its sustenance from them. It reminds me of a diminutive mistletoe, although confusingly it is part of the Sandalwood family. There is a bug Sehirus impressus that feeds solely on the sap of this rare plant. We found one of these small dark metallic blue bugs on our ramble: my photo doesn’t do it justice as it was so warm the bug was practically break-dancing in its pot, but never mind.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After several hours in the scorchio sun my water supplies had run out and I was ready to call it a day… But not the stalwarts of RDNHS, who gamely set off on a foray to inspect the neighbouring slope for botanical and entomological gems. My ambition for my twilight years is still to be actively enjoying nature, so those more senior members of RDNHS are an inspiration. I salute them! Those of us who work in conservation owe a massive debt to such passionate and thorough amateur naturalists who have amassed a huge body of painstaking observations of our native wild plants and animals.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From the older generation to the younger… It is peak season for field teaching and I have been very busy working with schools and youth groups at Rushall Farm, Five A Day Market Garden and the RSPB’s Living Classroom at Thatcham. Schools often prefer to schedule their field trips for the summer term, although to be honest they could have just as good a day out in spring or autumn – or even winter for some study topics.

At Rushall Farm schools come on residential camps as well as day trips, which gives us a chance to do more adventurous things such as campfires, bivouac building and team building activities such as sheep herding. I’m telling you now, if you haven’t seen a class of eleven year-olds trying to get half a dozen confused sheep into a pen, you haven’t lived. I haven’t laughed so much in ages. One pupil related to their parent that they’d been “sheep hurdling”: that pretty much covers it. And the bivouacs that the kids build in the woods are works of art. Maybe not always 100% weatherproof, but creative marvels nonetheless. Ray Mears, eat your heart out.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What I like about the camps at Rushall is that you get to know the children over a couple of days and build up a rapport with them. Too often when classes come on trips there are worksheets to be done and curriculum topics to be covered: all worthy stuff and part of what outdoor education is about, but for me the real point to it all is making sure these kids develop a strong and lasting connection with the natural world that will sustain them throughout their lives. There’s a lot of talk these days about Nature Deficit Disorder and the lack of contact that most children (and adults) have with nature, so it’s easy to feel despondent… But what I see when I’m field teaching is children quickly getting into the wild experience, especially if there are ‘real’ things such as mud, sticks or campfires involved. The only things holding kids back seem to be adult fears about risks (not a problem if you plan things properly and set boundaries with groups) or getting clothes dirty (leave the designer gear at home). No-one will be able to see your designer labels once they’re muddy, anyway – and tribal facepaint (as modelled by me below after a bivouac building session at Rushall) beats Bourjois make-up any day.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It has been challenging teaching on some of these really wet days, but to give the kids credit, I haven’t heard a single one moan about the rain – even when they’ve been sent to us with insufficient footwear or rainproof clothing and have consequently spent the day somewhat damp. I’ve loaned a lot of clothing to kids in the last month in an effort to keep them at least partly dry: my feeling is that maybe instead of twittering on about reviving O-levels and getting kids to learn poetry by rote, Mr Gove should ensure that all schools have a set of wet weather gear that can be borrowed by kids going on field trips. Why should kids suffer because their parents are apparently clueless about what constitutes ‘appropriate clothing’ for a country where rain is the norm at the moment?

Getting off my soapbox… Despite the wet weather, I’ve had some great days out with school groups. Hunting for minibeasts, pond dipping and going on sensory nature walks are still crowd-pleasers. And even when I’ve had a gruelling day with a ‘challenging’ group, the things the kids come out with when I ask them what they remember about the day never fail to lift my spirits. No-one works in environmental education for the financial rewards, and teaching of any sort is at best demanding and at worst exhausting, but when I think of all the thousands of children I’ve worked with it feels worthwhile. I know what a positive impact my early nature education experiences had on me at primary school, and how that’s sustained me in later life. I just hope that some of what I do will have a similar effect on the children I teach.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Since the rainy season began and I became temporary host to the World’s Most Persistent Cough, I’ve not had much time to garden on the allotment that I share with my friend Tessa. Last time I visited (over a week ago) the blackfly were taking over the broad beans and I spent an unpleasant half hour dealing with them, as well as weeding like a fiend. However there has been just enough sun to ripen our strawberries so this weekend we picked four punnets, as well as some early raspberries and a few broad beans. It’s been a weird year for gardening so we’re not getting too bothered about our lack of produce so far. Everything looked very pale and washed out (literally) until very recently, but now hopefully things will get growing if we get a few warmer days. I planted some climbing French beans that a friend of mine gave me seeds of: an heirloom variety called O’Driscoll, which you can leave the pods on to grow large and then harvest the bean seeds for drying and using as a cooked pulse. I’m looking forward to sampling them later this year.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One other nice thing I did on one of the few sunny Sundays we’ve had was to go for a bike ride along the canal towpath to Kintbury. It was hot day and I was very glad to break my journey near the wonderfully-named wet woodland called The Wilderness, and go for a wade in the River Kennet (which runs parallel to the Kennet and Avon Canal at this point).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The river was crystal clear and beautifully cool and I spent a very pleasant half hour paddling about in it, spotting fish and botanising along the banks. The Kennet is a superb chalk stream, despite worries about its falling water levels. On the Action for the River Kennet (ARK) website you can find a lot of information about its current problems and wonderful wildlife. Simply put, we’re using too much water: ARK states that Thames Water abstracts 19 million litres of water per day from the aquifers that should be feeding the Upper Kennet. With all the rain we’ve had it may be hard to imagine that lack of water is still an issue, but it is. Leaks from water company infrastructure are definitely a factor, but that doesn’t mean that as individuals we shouldn’t also take steps to conserve water in our homes and gardens. My personal favourite tip is: Turn off the tap whilst brushing your teeth. This saves about 12 litres of water per person, every day. If everyone in Berkshire did this, it would save over 10 million litres of water per day… Which is over half of the water currently being taken out of those aquifers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Time for me to go and pack my bag for another day’s field teaching on the morrow, so I’ll end this blog entry here. The forecast is for heavy rain and we have a large school group booked in at Thatcham so no doubt that will be interesting! But on the plus side we’re finding lots of groovy snails and slugs on our minibeast hunts… And frogs in the meadow. I will leave you with a picture of one the kids found last week, whilst sweep netting for insects. They were thrilled, the frog less so. It may be tough sometimes being a field teacher in the rain, but it’s even tougher being an amphibian who lives in area used regularly for environmental education. I suspect we’ll be seeing the same frog more than once before the end of term.

Stop Press: Winter Not Yet Over

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It’s that time of year when weather can be at its most British: sunny and mild one day, wild and wet and cold the next… And the past week has been true to seasonal form. Last Saturday I was cycling around Thatcham Reedbeds after working with the Young Rangers group at the Nature Discovery Centre. Glorious sunshine had brought out local people and the wildlife, and I found not only Blackthorn Prunus spinosa in flower but also catkins on the Alders Alnus glutinosa around the edge of the lake there.

From Blackthorn we get the phrase ‘Blackthorn Winter’, which refers to a spell of cold weather often coinciding with the blossoming of this early-flowering native shrub. Blackthorn flowers appear before the leaves, which makes them easy to differentiate from Hawthorn Crataegus monogyna. The other plant that could be confused with Blackthorn is Cherry Plum, Prunus cerasifera; but this tends to flower earlier still than Blackthorn, grows taller, and is largely lacking the long sharp woody thorns that Blackthorn bears in abundance. I can testify to the wounding power of these: some years ago I spiked my arm on Blackthorn during a conservation task, and unbeknownst to me the brittle thorn broke off inside the muscle… From whence it was surgically removed some four weeks later, after I’d begun wondering why my arm wasn’t healing up.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Alder is another interesting native tree: usually found growing alongside water or in damp woodlands, it bears long catkins in the spring from which the wind blows clouds of pollen onto its smaller cone-like female flowers (last year’s woody ‘cones’ are visible in my photograph). Alder wood has the useful property of not rotting when under water, an attribute that led it to be used for making bridge piles, sluice gates, water pipes and clogs. It also produces a good quality charcoal that was once used in the production of gunpowder. It is a valuable tree species for wildlife, supporting leaf- and nectar-feeding insects and seed-feeding birds, as well as helping to stabilise waterside banks with its roots. In folklore Alder had a somewhat sinister reputation as the pale timber appears to bleed after felling, turning from its pale freshly-cut colour to a bright orange-red.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There was a lot of bird activity on this mild day too, with smaller birds such as Great and Blue Tits, Blackbirds, Robins and finches hectoring each other from the bushes whilst waterfowl were busy on the lake. No sign yet of the Sand Martins returning to their deluxe nest box complex (that you can just see on the lake island in the photo above), but lots of paddlers about: Mallards, Shovellers, Tufted Ducks, Great Crested Grebes, Coots and Moorhens with their comedy feet, Mute Swans and of course the ubiquitous Canada Geese. People feed the birds on the lake (usually grain that is bought from the Nature Discovery Centre, helping to generate a little extra income) so there are always plenty to see.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our Young Rangers session was about recycling and Fair Trade: the children divided into two teams (boys and girls, inevitably) and built ‘buggies’ from recycled materials that were then raced against each other. ‘Team Girl 6’ were the overall winners, success largely due to their superior abilities to co-operate and work together, it seemed! Notably, their buggy included a matchbox luggage compartment for storing useful stuff, and was accompanied by a selection of nifty team flags. I predict that Jeremy Clarkson should be worried.

After playing some ‘Unfair Games’ we made spring chocolate cornflake nests, using Fair Trade chocolate. The kids even made some for me and co-leader Becky, as well as other staff at the Discovery Centre, so I was nicely fuelled up for my bike ride back home afterwards. Just before I set off I discovered my first Sweet Violet Viola odorata of the year, flowering on the sunny bank near the centre. They have sweetish scent which is unlike any other flower, and which possesses the curious power of temporarily anaesthetising your smell receptors. I’m not sure what evolutionary benefit this would confer, but it remains one of my favourite early spring wild blooms. The leaves are also the foodplant for Fritillary butterfly species, should you need any further encouragement to find room in your garden for a few violets.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Early flowers are appearing and so are the lambs at Rushall Farm, the first mob of ewes having begun giving birth. This is the start of what will be a flood of over 1,400 lambs by Easter – and many hundreds of school children and youth groups who come to the farm on educational visits, too. I was teaching at Rushall this week and will be almost every weekday from now until Easter: we had two schools of ‘littlies’ who were fun to work with, and on Thursday we all got to see a ewe giving birth to triplets – high excitement! The kids were awe-struck and asked lots of questions about the process (especially about the gory bits). Steve the shepherd handled the whole thing very competently with the assistance of a veterinary student on work placement at the farm, even managing to keep a running commentary going whilst rummaging about inside the sheep. Very impressive.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After a rather nice mild end to the week, Sunday came over decidedly wintery again, which was frustrating as I’d been stuck indoors with a stomach bug on Saturday and was pining for some fresh air. I decided to head for the allotment anyway, whereupon the rain turned into near-horizontal snow. Digging up leeks in a howling blizzard is an interesting experience; whimpering slightly I managed to get my harvest in and scuttle home to a hot bath, with leeks for supper. The allotment hasn’t got much going on with all the cold weather we’ve been having: our broccoli won’t be ready till late spring or early summer, and our cabbages probably fall into the category of ‘baby vegetables’ at present. It’s a bit like waiting for Christmas. I’m still munching my way through last year’s frozen runner beans and courgettes though, so I’m not complaining.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The aforesaid stomach bug was particularly annoying as it prevented me from going along to sing at a ‘Ukes For UNICEF’ charity benefit festival in Berkhamsted on Saturday. Unfortunately that left my co-performer John in the lurch, although he of course managed to give a successful ukulele-playing solo spot. And we did have a good night earlier in the week at the Unplug The Wood open mike at the Lion Brewery in Ash. It was standing room only and people were very complimentary, plus I won a bottle of wine in the raffle so a good evening out! For those of you who weren’t there, there are a couple of videos up on YouTube of me singing with John on uke, should you be so inclined to have a listen.

The coming week sees me busy teaching at Rushall and co-leading Sing The World community choir in Newbury, so fingers crossed for weather that feels more like spring than winter as March marches on. I spotted some Lesser celandines Ranunculus ficaria starting to open on a south-facing hedgebank as I drove home last week, beautiful little starry yellow wild flowers that shout “NECTAR!” at any passing insects who may have been brave enough to come out of hibernation…
So for their sake and mine, hopefully some warmer days will soon turn up.