3 ms·

I had a heap of old wet logs that I was going to cover up, season, and then idk do something with them. I moved one and disturbed three hibernating admiral but

I had a heap of old wet logs that I was going to cover up, season, and then idk do something with them. I moved one and disturbed three hibernating admiral butterflies. The log went back on the pile and it’s been left there for years. The thought of disturbing their life like that fills me with remorse and gradually more and more of my garden is turning into carefully nurtured fallow ground. You have to stay on top of the weeds. Some plants just muscle in and fuck it up for everyone else. I’m looking at you, comfrey. Pulling their satanic tap roots out one by one gives me great pleasure. They are the devil’s carrot. Cowslips and oxslips are good sharers of ground. They seem to push out the asshole plants but let others grow around them. You can collect the heads in late summer and harvest the seed to vernalise and grow new slips. I managed to convert 15000 seeds — yes, I counted them — into ten new plants. Maybe I’ll do better next year. My garden blends from suburban stuck up prissyness, through wild flowers, then brush, and into weedy chaos. The opulence of the former hopefully balanced by the diversity of the latter. Too many brown widows though. They seem to really like the home I’ve made. Oh well. I guess you can’t have citron butterflies without also risking a nasty bite. The best insect hotel is a pile of firewood that is too open for butterfly hibernation. It is covered with slates and will get burned on cool summer nights once the residents have moved out. The ash goes into the scrub patch as fertiliser. I should burn the comfrey and feed it back to the survivors of my purge, as a macabre justice.

tharkun__ 5y ago
This! All of this so much! Coincidentally I read about insect hotels recently as well and also on the topic of cleaning them and also that many commercial ones are just completely inadequate (wrong type of holes and materials and such). I figured out that our yard actually already provides perfect insect hotels. Those leaves I didn't get to shred and put on the compost pile before the weather was too wet? Perfect for certain types of insects. The birds think so too as they rummage through it every spring. What I will try this year is taking some of the firewood and drilling the right size holes in it. The good thing? I can just burn it in summer in the pizza oven and not worry about cleaning up. I'll just take some new logs and do the same thing. And all the kindling, which is just branches that fall from the trees all the time anyway get collected in a big pile. Perfect insect hotel. By the time I start using it in summer, they'll have moved out. I also compost in place for most flowering plants. E.g. my Hostas. I do take the flower stems out so they don't stick up and "look bad" but I just break them once of twice and leave them in place. Doubly so for the leaves, those of course just stay in place. Perfect compost for the new Hostas next year without having to actually spread compost everywhere. And it probably doubles as an insect hotel as well.
arethuza 5y ago
We had a bumper crop of plums in our garden last year and I was quite able to either eat them all or pick up the ones that had fallen to the ground. Turns out that having rotting plums lying about attracts huge numbers of butterflies - which was glorious. I'm going to make point of leaving plenty plums out for butterflies in future!

tharkun__ 5y ago

This! All of this so much! Coincidentally I read about insect hotels recently as well and also on the topic of cleaning them and also that many commercial ones are just completely inadequate (wrong type of holes and materials and such). I figured out that our yard actually already provides perfect insect hotels. Those leaves I didn't get to shred and put on the compost pile before the weather was too wet? Perfect for certain types of insects. The birds think so too as they rummage through it every spring. What I will try this year is taking some of the firewood and drilling the right size holes in it. The good thing? I can just burn it in summer in the pizza oven and not worry about cleaning up. I'll just take some new logs and do the same thing. And all the kindling, which is just branches that fall from the trees all the time anyway get collected in a big pile. Perfect insect hotel. By the time I start using it in summer, they'll have moved out. I also compost in place for most flowering plants. E.g. my Hostas. I do take the flower stems out so they don't stick up and "look bad" but I just break them once of twice and leave them in place. Doubly so for the leaves, those of course just stay in place. Perfect compost for the new Hostas next year without having to actually spread compost everywhere. And it probably doubles as an insect hotel as well.

arethuza 5y ago

We had a bumper crop of plums in our garden last year and I was quite able to either eat them all or pick up the ones that had fallen to the ground. Turns out that having rotting plums lying about attracts huge numbers of butterflies - which was glorious. I'm going to make point of leaving plenty plums out for butterflies in future!