Human Bee-ing

All the plants I use in guerrilla planting are a. tough, b. a bit invasive, c. will likely self-seed and d. most importantly, they are bee-friendly. You all should know by now that bees are in serious decline worldwide. This is obviously crap for the bees. It is also deadly for the eco-system of which we are a part. Bees pollinate flowering crops. They are intrinsic to our food supplies. We _need_ Bees. Bees need flowering plants that actually have pollen in them (so dont bother with Begonias or Buzy Lizzies or most over-bred bedding plants that produce colour but no pollen). But feeding the bees is not enough. Returning hedgerows to the land cut up by the monocrop culture of Big Agriculture is not enough. World-renowned magazines like Nature have been reporting the deadly and long-lasting effects of particular poisons called Neonicotinoids on bee colony collapse (Bayer and Syngenta are the two big brands associated with making insecticides containing neonicotinoids).

For us this means two things. Firstly stop using pesticides in your own gardens. It is pointless providing pollen rich plants if you also poison the bees along with aphids (and poisoned bees will return to their colonies thereby transmitting the poison).  And secondly keep alert to the stellar EU effort to ban neonicotinoids from not just personal use (and bees do not respect 'private gardens') but crucially mass agricultural use. At the moment the UK and Germany are trying to block this ban (countries that are the base of Bayer and Syngenta). Sign every petition you can in support of banning neonicotinoids.

Here is one to pressure our MP's to ask Owen Paterson to support the proposed ban. The Buglife website gives example wording. 

A small start is to buy organic food - that will support smaller producers, and will categorically not be grown using chemicals including pesticides.

pocket spring

 

Stories Road is looking great! almost - maybe everything - has survived and will soon be putting on some height (and thus be noticeable all the way up and down Grove Lane). I have also added some California Poppy seeds so watch out for the blue grey filigree of their foliage. Maybe the Chef Solaire and I should stick a planting plan to the back of the road name.

Dog Kennel Hill is also SPLENDID. If you count the spaces between the trees as sections then there are 5 sections available for guerrilla sensibility. I have noticeably planted sections 1 and 2, plus started in on 4 (there was a logic to that at the time involving a bad weed patch in 3 plus some tragic tomatoes that some well-meaning person had added in and left to fend for themselves).

Section 2 got some more Lychnis, Hardy Geranium and Aquilegia yesterday. 

Section 4 - in which the 3 Fennel plants, previously added in between the irises, are still making it (they are great gg plants as long as they get watered until established). I added in 2 Alchemilla either side of the lavender and a largish pot of Michaelmas Daisies.

No pics yet, but the tree pit in Camberwell Grove, opposite the Vineyard, is also surviving enough to get more plants - Michaelmas Daises, Leucanthemum and Creeping Jenny.

an earthworm of one's own

Brought back a bucket full of leafmould from my parents' garden, heaving with worms and deposited them on the hard dry soil of Dog Kennel Hill. The leafmould pile is about 10ft square and I have been helping out with ferrying it across the garden to be dug in prior to veg planting. Its like worm spaghetti. So, I indentured them to make my patch more diggable!

iron council

Ok it is not mild. Really not mild. I can see bulbs popping through and plants I want to divide but its too damn cold. I have however bribed a friend into helping me plant/weed some of my patches (little does she know) in exchange for seeds and plants.

I stopped by the Dog Kennel Hill patch yesterday and saw that the council have done their random dig. I suppose its ok, most of my stuff is still there...Brave Aquilegia making it through... and the large and more identifiable clumps of Escholzia [sp?] aka California Poppies are there though some small casualities have been 'thinned out'... There is a Yucca in trouble however, if anyone who actually reads this has a stake it would be great if you could forcefully prop it up otherwise someone is going to remove it (the plant is horizontal and poking out into the road).

camberwell grove, even

...and today  I also spied that the ground by the railway underpass/weak bridge in the middle of 'the grove' is wet enough to dig... and I have a spare sarcococca just waiting to be re-homed...

...and this today I re-homed it in that very place, testing out how crap the soil is [which is quite crap - its only the rain that has made it at all diggable, but sarcococca can cope with dry shade just fine] and also adding in 2 hollyhocks from the forest on dog kennel hill. I also did a bit more weeding and trimming up that hill and found that there are indeed hollyhocks sprouting the whole way up amongst the weeds...I tried to make it more obvious that they are there so hopefully no council workers will weed them out.

...and previously on camberwell grove I realised that there was a new-ish small tree-pit with bare soil not concreted over, so I added in euphorbia, an aquilegia and lychnis. Its opposite The Vineyard.

Beating the Weeds

Its 2013, I finished my book, its ridiculously mild, still, though not actually raining again. So, I went to the Dog Kennel Hill patch with gloves, recyclying bag and plants. I added in 3 x bronze fennel, 1 x euphorbia robbiae, 1 x euphorbia wulfenii and a hardy geranium - and did two whole sacks of weeding... J had to stop by and bring the second sack along with a second set of gloves because the first set got sopping wet. Mainly I pulled out the stuff I thought was couch grass but is probably trefoil, groundsel and sodden leaves. The whole patch is looking really healthy in spite of the carpet of weeds. The Euphorbias are all doing really well. With all the rain the Acanthus is finally bedding in to the otherwise hard soil. The California Poppies seeded widely so they will look extra great this year. I am rather amazed that the Lychnis does not seem to have seeded even though it does so willy-nilly in my parents' garden which is why I have some to guerrilla garden. The Hollyhocks remain alarmingly prolific. At some point I want to transplant a lot more of them up the hill and perhaps in St Giles Churchyard gardens.

I did check in to make sure the plants I added to St Giles were still doing ok and yes indeed, 2 Arum Lillies and an Acanthus.

Mucking in

Also... thanks to Helena of Grove Park for some compost! She is spearheading an ambitious plan to guerrilla garden ALL of the tree pits in Grove Park and has kindly donated some compost for my guerrilla works in exchange for some ready to go Michaelmas daisies (and there will be some white daisies, Leucanthemum, and maybe some hardy Geraniums ready in a few weeks too).