It's been interesting to see what's growing from the soil we collected some weeks back.
Seeds present in it have germinated into dandelions, grass, bittercress (flick weed), Oak-leaved goosefoot and Petty spurge (Milkweed)!
It's been interesting to see what's growing from the soil we collected some weeks back.
Seeds present in it have germinated into dandelions, grass, bittercress (flick weed), Oak-leaved goosefoot and Petty spurge (Milkweed)!
thanks ivy mulch - wherever you came from! |
cutting the fallen branches up into smaller bits |
looking looking looking! |
<3 |
earwig :) |
spider :) |
RUBBISH! |
From https://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-03-01/insect-hotels/
Insect Hotels Attract Beneficial Insects
Beneficial insects support biodiversity, the foundation for the world’s ecological balance. An insect hotel in your garden will attract these beneficial insects, offering them a space where they can propagate and hunker down for the winter. Encouraging biodiversity in the garden helps to increase ecosystem productivity.
Placing an insect hotel in the garden increases the chances that beneficial insects will naturally visit your garden. Also known as bug hotels, bug boxes, and bug houses, these human-made structures offer several benefits. In addition to their decorative qualities, they help supplement the increasing loss of natural habitats.
Although altered and heavily landscaped gardens can be beautiful, they often lack enough of the natural habitats needed to attract beneficial insects and encourage biodiversity. Placing insect hotels in your garden offers optimal bug real estate – the right kinds of habitats to attract these beneficial insects, increase their numbers, and reduce the need for pesticides, since these bugs offer biological pest control. A balanced ecosystem provides numerous benefits not just for the individual garden, but for the environment as a whole.
Benefits of Insect Hotels
Natural Pest Control
Welcoming beneficial insects and pollinators into your garden reduces or eliminates the need for pesticides. Poison kills weeds and pesky insects, but poison is not selective: it kills beneficial insects as well.
According to the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, three-quarters of the world’s flowering plants and roughly 35 percent of the world’s food crops depend on animal pollinators to reproduce, with more than 3,500 species of native bees helping to increase crop yields. By some estimates, one out of every three bites of food we consume depends on animal pollinators like bees, butterflies and moths, birds, bats, beetles, and other insects.
Insect Hotels: Purchase or DIY?
Different insects require different accommodations in which to thrive. Do a little research about the climate in your area before you decide what kind of insect hotel to buy or make. Each bug habitat performs a different function depending on the location’s climate. In cold climates, they offer a refuge for hibernation, while in warmer climates they function as dry nesting places during the wet season.
While there are many varieties of insect hotels available for purchase, building your own can be a relatively simple, fun, and educational DIY project you can do with children. Using a variety of found natural materials, you can build a bug or bee condo perfect for each type of insect you hope to attract.
Solitary bees and wasps seek places to lay their eggs, so they will be attracted to various-sized holes in wood. They also like to hide out in the open spaces in bamboo poles, which you can cut into small pieces. If drilling holes into wood, vary the sizes from 0.2-0.4 inches in diameter so other species will also fill those spaces. Not-so-nice wood works too: wood-boring beetles love rotting logs.
Reclaimed and repurposed materials such as old pallets, drilled logs, hollow bamboo poles, cardboard tubes, egg cartons, small stones, pieces of concrete and tile, pine cones, pieces of bark, found twigs, dead and rotting wood, hay, plant stems, and discarded planters are some of the kinds of materials that are perfect for constructing a habitat for your garden’s pollination and pest control workforce.
Where to Place the Bug Hotel
A bee hotel needs to be a high-rise to keep away ants, which love dining on bee larvae. Other bug boxes require sheltered but sunny spots surrounded by a variety of flowering and insectary plants (plants that attract and harbor beneficial insects).
Designers from all over the world have created insect hotels that double as works of art. Who knows, maybe you’ll be inspired to build a better insect house – and if all else fails, there’s always ready-made housing you can gift to your bug friends.
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From https://entomologistlounge.wordpress.com/2017/09/18/insect-hotels-a-refuge-or-a-fad/
Countless gardening stores and home furnishing stores sell insect hotels. Numerous blogs and websites have step-by-step manuals on how to build one yourself. All units are aesthetically pleasing which motivates well-intentioned buyers into adopting the concept. However, these insect hotels are often badly designed and they offer unsuitable home to the target insects. The warning sign of such designs is the unnecessary use of pine cones, glued snail shells, wood shavings and clear plastic tubes. Too many off-shelf insect hotels or build-your-own websites do not come with clear guide on maintenance, which is very important in ensuring the survival of the insects we intend to host.
Large insect hotels (aptly called insect condominiums) using wooden pallets are becoming very popular as individual or community gardening projects, sometimes to include non-insects such as frogs, toads and hedgehogs. In contrast, natural insect habitats occur as small separate nests, and large insect hotels pose risk of disease and parasitism to the insects inhabiting in high density inside. In fact, Rosita Moenen [1] observed that increasing number of badly-designed artificial nesting sites contributed to higher loss of (solitary) bees by parasitism.
Parasitism happens when kleptoparasites lay their eggs in tubes or cells occupied by bee larvae. Their larvae will hatch, consume the stored pollen and kill the bee larvae inside. Examples are parasitic wasps Melittobia acasta and Coelopencyrtus sp., and parasitic fly (Cacoxenus indigator) that attack red mason bees [1]. Insect hotels (especially large ones) make it very susceptible to parasitism. [1][2]. When not managed, the parasites will end up spreading to the rest of the insect hotels and will continue on for following seasons. In similar note, mould brings diseases to insects. It grows when moisture condenses and gets trapped in plastic materials [3] used in insect hotels as tubes and blocks. Lack of good roof/shelter on insect hotels, risking constant exposure to rain also contributes to mould growth.
Here is the right approach to insect hotels:
Tips to make your garden an insect refuge:
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A stump saved from the wood chipper at Radius in Delft, now making itself at home in the garden in Charlois...
bye bye soil :'( |
We started to notice that the nightshade growing on the left side of the garden were beginning to really take over - forming a bit of a monoculture which was limiting other plant species from growing and establishing. As part of the communal working day we decided to make some choices with the nightshade, removing some of them to open up the bed, and enable the opportunity for others to grow with less competition.
To begin we started with a rubbish collection moment, finding a multitude of things - a mattress, water hose end, beer cans, pokemon card, even Santa! Again we kept some of the pieces that we could re-use in the future or just took our fancy for whatever reason, though others we relocated to the nearby bin. It's interesting to see each time what objects have moved into this section of the park, it seems to be a huge range, and we question each time what things we decide to remove, what to keep, and in both circumstances why? It's been clear that the private and secretive corner of this garden could easily be used as a sleeping spot, or a hangout point for beers, this leafy green space offering a supportive cocoon to those that seek it. When we remove these pieces of residue, we also remove traces of the ability to use the garden in these ways, but what ways can we try to allow room for them to exist alongside other activities in there, such as a space for adventures for children for example. These are questions we are pondering, for now we removed the cans and sharp objects, the microplastic that are not so nice to leave for the soil, the cigarette butts too. And the mattress that is tossed barely in the garden is moved too, but perhaps it will come back if it was eagerly enjoyed. Let's see.
But back to the nightshades... once our rubbish moving was done we drew our attention to these plants -
Black nightshade - Zwarte nachtschade - solanum nigrum
In the nightshade family, so related to tomatoes, potatoes and aubergines, all parts of the plant except for fully ripe berries are toxic. Native to Europe, it is now defined as a weed in other countries such as Australia due to its prolific growing habits. An annual or sometimes short lived perennial, it can reach up to 120cm tall, with a 60cm width, growing often with large flat leaves that form heart or toothed edges, their flowers are generally white with a yellow center surrounded by five petals, and they form berries that change to black when ripe (one cultivar in India produces red berries). Ingesting the raw leaves or unriped fruit has been known to result in solanine poisoning (which causes gastrointestinal and neurological reactions), though many varieties exist that have been used as food sources and medicinally for people all over the world.
For more info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solanum_nigrum
As we did not know specifically what cultivar of black nightshade it was, we were careful when handling it just in case. But it would be great to work out if this type is edible at all.
We tried our best to disturb the soil and surrounding species as little as possible, lifting the plants up with trowels. We decided to only remove what we felt was necessary to provide more room for the other plant species to have more opportunity to establish and flourish, keeping a more balanced diversity in the garden. It was difficult to decide exactly when to stop, when there was enough room, and enough nightshade to also let this species flourish. Through talking and checking in with each other we eventually came to a decision on when to put tools down! The plant species in this section of the garden are mostly plants that have germinated by themselves - seeds sprouting that were already in the soil previously, perhaps blew in somehow, or was sown by someone, human or otherwise. There are also a small amount of plants there that were planted by Rotterdam Gemeente, such as English Ivy.
We are curious to see how the plants now grow alongside each other with this extra room, particularly as the weather begins to shift from Summer towards Autumn, bringing more rain, stormy conditions and a cooler temperature.
We placed the plant material into the already existing takkenrillen around the garden before then tucking into a nice lunch in the shade! :)
Here are some photos of the day, from Kate and Silvia >>>
but first we need to remove a mattress! |
found Santa... |
finding ways to as carefully and considerately pull up some of the nightshade - with a trowel we wiggled each plant out, trying to limit the impact to the soil and surrounding plants |
we encountered lots of worms along the way! |
Silvia was cutting the uprooted plants into smaller pieces ready for adding them into our takkenrillen |