This little fella – I know he’s a ‘he’ because the females are all black has taken to spending his nights in the keyhole of our allotment shed and I’ve had to chuck him out two or three times in order to get the key in to open up. We were talking about planting more bee attractors on the plot, and now we’ve made up our minds to plant some Lungwort – Pulmonaria, and more Comfrey because the old plants have expired. This bee isn’t a communal bee but a solitary one; however apparently he occasionally gets into a gathering rather like Ivy bees do. I owe this ID to Alvan, a fellow musketeer, but I’m desperately trying to avoid getting into bees because at least flowers stay still while I photograph them, and I find that entomologists and lepidopterists can go into a faraway place where their eyes swivel independently in order not to miss anything.
Anyway, any interesting botanical expeditions have been delayed while we get the allotment up to speed. You’ll notice that the tomatoes in our polytunnel are all carrying commercial labels, but before you toss your head scornfully, we moved over to commercial grafted plants a couple of years ago because they are completely blight resistant and much higher yielding. The grafted aubergines which we also buy are sitting atop a rootstock as thick as a pencil already. We are already looking forward to the summer crops. The potatoes are peeping above their ridges; the Chard leaves are enormous but delicious and the fruit trees and bushes are almost finished flowering. Our two resident robins are so fat from following us around as we work that they can barely take off and fly back to their nestlings. Despite the awful weather of the past months, nature has her hand on the tiller once more, it seems.
Last Saturday we had a local field trip around Victoria Park and the Botanical Gardens and we spotted these Three Cornered Garlic plants which thrive around here having evaded border control whilst migrating from the Mediterranean. Elsewhere in the UK they’re harder to find – but I think they’re absolutely beautiful and deserve to be spared by foragers. In Cornwall whole hedgerows have been stripped of Ramsons – Wild Garlic – by commercial foragers. Which reminds me – as it’s peak St George’s Mushroom season – that although they’re generally promoted as safe I’ve met two people, both highly experienced mycologists, who developed symptoms of poisoning after twenty or thirty years of eating them safely. Some plants and fungi contain some pretty nasty accumulative toxins so please do be careful. If there’s a scintilla of doubt in your mind, don’t eat it!
