Reepham Life

By Victoria Plum

I bought a packet of (A for anemone,) Anemone Blanda Blue and a packet of (C for Chionodoxa) Glory of the Snow from Johnny Walker who talked on the A to Z of Bulbs at the November meeting of Reepham & District Gardening Club.

I noticed that all the packaging for these bulbs, of which he brought loads for us to buy, is recyclable – how sensible that is.

I have learned to look for the symbol on all packaging, and interestingly the compostable tubs of Ronaldo ice cream (made in Norwich) have decayed well in my compost bin, as have the salad bags from Eves Hill Veg Co and the picnic kit from Castle Rising nursery.

Above: Ronaldo ice cream tubs and compostable items, including “plastic”, at the top of the bin, ready to rot. Photo: Tina Sutton

My big, double-skinned, plastic hot bin is now working well, and I have been emptying it in mid-November.

The compost is a bit on the wet side, but I put that down to all the grass cuttings this wet year, although I have added plenty of torn-up corrugated card as a dry component.

Bought compost is sieved and so a more uniform, dry and easy-to-handle product results.

I don’t think you need a photo of the compost I have been moving from the bottom of the unit – I am sure you can imagine it.

Soil health is vital. I used to think of soil as something inert that just stopped the plants from falling over, but an understanding of the various worms and invertebrates that work it (work being the operative word) is fascinating.

My understanding now is that if I look after the soil by adding humus then it will look after my plants – and if they are healthy, they will be resilient and grow well. Hence the compost.

The next gardening club meeting is on Tuesday 14 December, earlier than the usual meetings, at 7 pm.

We usually all bring a plate to share but to avoid too much moving round the room, for Covid safety the committee ask you to please bring your own snacks. Further information will be on the website in due course.

There will also be a brief presentation by Thomas Courtauld, Deputy Lieutenant for Norfolk, on the Queen’s Green Canopy. This is a commemorative tree planting initiative to celebrate the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee next year, which I’m sure will be of great interest.

Oh, yes – and there will be a quiz. Hooray!

By Victoria Plum

Hooray! Reepham & District Gardening Club held its first “live” meeting this month when about 30 masked members met at Reepham Town Hall, suitably spaced out.

We listened to Simon Harrap from Natural Surroundings at Bayfield (who is fascinated by all plants, he told me) describe the life and habitat of British alpine plants.

He explained this small but fascinating world using his own photographs, so fortunately we don’t have to climb mountains and get wet knees searching the high places ourselves.

One of these, a tiny rush, was viviparous. I have always been fascinated by plants with this characteristic, and I have an unusual fern and a succulent, both viviparous, which means they reproduce via tiny plantlets attached to the parent plant. These fall to the ground to grow without the necessity for seeds.

While tidying the garden (not too tidy, please note) I picked up a dead stem from my gorgeous orange fritillarias and, finding it heavy, I looked inside to find a handsome, big, orange slug, with two little friends, and some woodlice and earwigs that had wandered off in the time it took me to get my camera. Obviously, I put it back in the garden.

Most slugs eat decaying matter of all sorts, helping to recycle litter on the soil surface. They are your friends, as are wasps, so please think twice before you go into extermination mode.

I have enjoyed wonderfully statuesque globe artichokes in my garden this year. Everything has grown tall and vast, and these are no exception. The stems are huge.

When I cut them down, I will bundle up short sections of stem to position in the garden to give homes for wildlife. It will be interesting to see what chooses to overwinter in them.

Don’t discard any spare plants you find this autumn. Bring them in a carrier bag to next month’s garden club meeting where they will be sold. Labels and details are a help. I will bring some Crocosmia “Lucifer” (below), which have performed magnificently this year.

By Victoria Plum

I sat at my computer the other day for a Zoom gardening club meeting (not Reepham’s).

It was a chat session; we enjoyed photos of each other’s gardens and a few questions and observations arose.

I asked if anyone had seen aphids this year because they certainly have been conspicuous by their absence in my garden.

No, not many, they said, and I said, doesn’t that worry you? No, they said. They were pleased.

But, I said, if there are no aphids then a crucial bit of the food chain is broken – not only ladybirds, hoverfly, earwigs, beetles and many predatory insects go short of their dinner, but many birds feed their young on aphids.

The result? No insects = no birds.

These people are all intelligent nature lovers and, surely, we all know about biodiversity by now and that it is in our hands, not just the anonymous “them”?

I have since found some blackfly on my cardoons, but there were ladybirds and hoverfly already in attendance, so I left them to it.

Above: Insect life on my cardoons. Below: Plenty of room for the slugs and me to coexist here. Photos: Tina Sutton

The chat went on to slugs. I mentioned how my grandmother taught me to put salt on them, shrivel them up and watch them froth as they died. But now I would no more do that than fly.

In fact, I had to admit to rescuing two slugs from a cabbage I was preparing for dinner last week and throwing them into the depths of my garden to live a happy summer.

Then someone admitted to putting slugs in the green waste bin, so they have a happy week or two before being carted off to the Great Compost Heap.

Someone else said they put them in a plastic bag with the end tied up, and then in the rubbish bin.

I learned of two lots of old people last week.

One lot made it their lockdown mission to get to the garden centre for weedkiller to kill off the few foolish weeds that had the temerity to try to grow through the plastic, gravel and concrete layer they call their “garden” and the other lot sought out Roundup to erase lichen from their paving slabs.

Are they mad? Have they no thought for the future, their children and grandchildren, and the generations to follow?

Here is something “they” (that is, the government) can address. “They” need to ban the sale in garden centres of all these dangerous garden chemicals, and they need to do it now.

Live and let the wildlife live, I say. And I am right.

Another Reepham & District Gardening Club trip was enjoyed recently by 34 members to East Basham Hall. The gardens were lovely and so was the cake.

If you want to be in the know (summer show coming up soon, and perhaps a return to normality), check the gardening club website.

By Victoria Plum

Having enjoyed Hawk Honey’s enthusiastic discourse on “Wasps, Malicious or Misunderstood?” at last week’s meeting of the Reepham & District Gardening Club (I think we know the answer to this question), I lay in bed carefully composing my report on this fascinating talk and regretting that I have very few wasp photos to show you in my collection.

Then off for my shower, when I saw a movement at the window and managed to catch this wasp, using my favoured technique of placing a glass over the insect and then sliding a card under to imprison the creature for inspection and then safe release.

If only this had happened the day before, I could have asked the expert for identification.

There are about 9,000 species of wasp, including 610 species of solitary wasp and endless parasitic wasps, but which is this? (I’ve now had another look and am pretty sure it’s an Ichneumon stramentor.)

Those we know are the nine sorts of social wasps, living in beautifully built colonies.

We think of them as “picnic spoilers”; we expect them in late summer but at that time their only concern is to find a “sugar rush”, hence their interest in your can of lager or the fallen fruit under your tree as they come to the end of their life.

They don’t get up in the morning to go out looking for humans to sting!

But most wasps look very different: tiny waisted, short, fat, long, thin or very tiny as we saw from Mr Honey’s photos.

We saw leafhoppers (they make cuckoo spit) shield bugs, aphids and caterpillars being parasitised, that is having an egg laid inside the anaesthetised body to provide sustenance for the hatchling.

We saw wasps excavating, building and nesting, all observed and filmed by our speaker.

If you put a tree log with a variety of holes drilled in it in full sun, upright (so as not to be damp), wasps will come (other insects too) and you too can watch them up close.

The message is that every single one of these creatures has a job to do and a place to fill in nature: each one depends on another and is depended upon in turn.

So, use chemicals in your garden at your peril – and that means everyone else’s peril.