Season ends at Kings Heath CC Garden

[KHCC Garden Club]

Hi all,

We ran the last session of our Garden club today for this year!  All has gone really well and enjoyed every session, and there's still strawberries out there!  Thanks everyone, and looking forward to starting again next year.

See last blog: http://khccgardenclub.blogspot.com/2011/11/lacewing-hotels.html

Thanks

Marcus

[Nick Williams]

Hi Marcus, Nikki and all

 

Enjoyed seeing the photos of lacewing hotel making. These normally are made of hollow stems such as sections of bamboo cane or hogweed stems or similar, but essentially as long as there are spaces of varying sizes available and accessible for small creatures and they are put in locations sheltered from the worst of the weather, they should be used by something. This may well not be lacewings, but could be earwigs, spiders, harvestmen, beetles etc. You could have a look at one or two of them in a few weeks' time once there have been a few really cold nights unless you prefer to leave well alone and never quite know what used them.

Another technique is to cut some long grass, (as in from a large tussock), and place that carefully in a sheltered location at the base of a shrub or plants that you aren't intending to disturb, leave for several weeks, then get something like a fertiliser bag (white plastic if possible), cut it open and spread it on the ground or on a table indoors, then collect your grass tussock or haycock and shake it out very gently over the fertiliser bag so the kids can see all the little bugs running for cover. When they have seen it, you can carefully return the grass and the contents to where they came from. This is a standard method of recording spiders, especially money spiders, most of which are mature and breeding over the winter rather than in the summer like their larger cousins. When I was in Teesdale many years ago I did quite a lot of this, and because very few spider recorders had spent any time in Teesdale we recorded several new species for Yorkshire including one or two new to England as well as new records for that north-western part of Yorkshire.

All the best,

Nick