Live 24-Seven - Preserving Wildlife Gardening With Lilly By Richard Fishbourne
What a fantastic summer we’ve had, the second year running! There’s no finer place than an English garden when the weather is good.
Richard runs his own business
www.bugsandbeasties.co.uk. He is a wildlife garden designer, landscaper and environmental education tutor.
If you think Richard can help with any project, he is always happy to offer advice.
Little Lilly can bob out of the French doors, bouncing barefoot in the mossy lawn, without a care in the world. I’ve never really understood why folks want to kill moss in a lawn; it’s a remarkable thing to me that there are companies that exist purely through killing all but blades of grass across a community of manicured madness! We love a bit of soft spongy moss, stumpy drifts of clover and dinky daisies to scramble on. I often think that we gardeners make a rod for our own backs by mithering about things that we think are im- portant and perhaps, rather than doing what comes naturally, we do things because we think it’s the way they should be done?! It’s always good to go with the flow; to understand what is happy growing in the garden according to soil type and situation is to be able to enjoy the space for what it is and not battle against the odds.
A fantastic summer has meant an equally fantastic crop of outdoor tomatoes. It looks like we’ll be able to start eating tomatoes on toast from the middle of August, that’s almost
Making courgette and feta fritters with vegetables straight from the garden!
three weeks earlier than normal! Always best not to count my chickens though, I noticed Lilly and chums had removed a couple of potential beauties prematurely! This is a rare thing now, though and Lilly is pretty good at recognising when fruit is ripe and ready to pick. Some of the tomato plants in the veg patch are six feet tall! This isn’t unusual for ‘Moneymaker’ in a greenhouse but a first for me outdoors. We have been vigilant in pricking out the side shoots just to make sure that as much energy as possible goes into plumping up the fruit, which seem to be dripping off the vines this year. “Can I help, Daddy? Can I do that?” says Lilly as I snap the vigorous stems from the clefts of the ‘canopy’. This whole scenario is a far cry from a couple of summers ago when the plants struggled to produce any fruit at all in the perpetual rain and when they eventually did they didn’t ripen. I’m glad I didn’t give up! All things being equal, Lilly’s cheeks will have the chance of a splattering of tomato soup all winter long.
On a sad note we heard a ‘thwack’ against the bay window only to look out and find the lifeless body of a young song thrush. It doesn’t happen often, fortunately and, when it does, fifty per cent of the time the hapless casualty manages to regain consciousness and recover from its ordeal, as it did in this case, thankfully. We picked up the poor little bird and popped it in a shady spot to recover and regain its composure. Hopefully we’ll be able to hear the little bird cracking open snail shells for many mornings to come…
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