August

No shortage of veggies this month as the harvest gets into full swing. Potatoes, runner and French beans, carrots and kale all keeping me well fed. And stacks of fruit - raspberries, blackberries, grapes, cherry and Victoria plums all doing nicely.

Plenty of plants for pollinators too, some like the perennial wallflower "Bowles Mauve" and the echium "Blue Bedder" have been flowering non-stop all summer, some like catmint, bladder campion and golden marguerite are flowering for a second time, whilst I'm getting another crop of flowers from a second sowing of phacelia. And of course others like helianthus, sedum, liatris and eupatorium save their glory for this time of year and are flowering for the first time.

In the meadow grass in the orchard the yellow of ragwort and blue of tufted vetch is giving way to the purple of common knapweed. A time of abundance for both me and the creatures with whom I share this little piece of planet earth.

Not so many of the common bumblebees around now as many of the colonies have reached the end of their lifecycle: order will have been replaced by anarchy and the old queen killed. However there are still plenty of tree bumblebees and carder bees around in need of nectar. It's been a fairly good year for butterflies - among the colourful garden varieties I've noticed more peacocks than small tortoiseshells this year and at the height of summer there was no shortage of the grassland types: gatekeepers, meadow browns, skippers and speckled woods. And a major improvement in the number of common blues I've seen.

Here's the pics:

 Cosmos coming to the fore in the pictorial meadow mix.

 Didiscus: I trialed this for the first time this year but it's been a disappointment, attracting very few pollinators and  also being good at falling over in the wind. One I'll probably not bother with again.

 Agastache: at the other end of the scale one of the very best plants for bees.

 Now that I'm getting a handle on which are the best plants for bees and butterflies I'm starting to think about combinations - what looks good together - to plan for future years. Here helenium, fading poppy stalks and borage with aster in the foreground.

 Agastache in the foreground with echinacia against the woody stems of a dying wallflower "Bowles Mauve".

 Meadow grass and wild flowers.

 Plot in the morning.

 Greenbottle fly on aster.

 Hoverfly on helianthus.

 Large white on verbena.

 Tree bumblebee on scabious.

 Common knapweed in the meadow grass.

 Potentilla and bladder campion make a nice combination.

 Tree bumblebee on agastache.

A treat at this time of year is seeing the sedum flowers change colour as they slowly open.

A late bumblebee on dahlia.

And the not-so-common Common Blue on marjoram.

July

No shortage of fresh produce from the plot at this time of year. The peas are over but there's runner and climbing French beans, carrots, cabbages, kale, tomatoes, wild rocket and mizuna, blackberries, raspberries and cherry plums.

A heatwave in the middle of the month has brought out plenty of butterflies and there's been no shortage of bees either. Plenty of nectar rich plants for them here of course - just about everything that was flowering last July is at it again, plus a few new ones too.

Also around this month is the beautiful white plume moth. I call them angel moths, although that's probably something altogether different . Apparently the caterpillars feed on bindweed. I knew it must be useful for something - so now I know.

Meadow mix

Nearing the end of the month now and the meadow mix is in full swing...

...with poppies, bishop's flower and a smattering of cornflowers:

The bees just love hitting those poppies first thing in the morning.

Meadow mixes

Many of what are sold as "meadow" seed mixes are no such thing, as I've ranted on about before, but if they bring in the pollinators then it hardly matters.

At the bottom of my plot I've got a cornfield mix which happily self sows itself with different flowers dominating each year - this summer it's mainly field poppies, phacelia and a few cornflowers, night-flowering catchfly and corncockles:

At the top of the plot I sow a mix from  www.pictorialmeadows.co.uk. This years was meant to be a "pastel mix" but has turned out to be mainly red poppies, bishop's flower and cornflowers - and again, not properly meadow flowers at all but rather a mix of colourful annuals, but the bees aren't complaining:

Next to my cabin I cleared an area of brambles where I'll be adding an extension (one day over the rainbow) and threw in seed from various old seed packets and saved seed. This has been my favorite mix this year as what came up was a complete surprise - mainly mustard, field poppies and phacelia: 

Wild flowers

One effect of the weird weather this year is that the pictorial meadow seeds I sowed back in April totally failed to germinate. Not a sausage. They're not cheap either. The previous couple of years they've come up a treat and been a big hit with the bees.  All I've got to show this year are a few shirley poppies that self-seeded from last year and a few opium poppies which always come up everywhere anyway. And a stray foxglove.

Incidently the yellow one in front is a cerinthe which found it's way in there somehow. So anyway I've plugged the gap with some Nicotiana mutabilis that I've been growing so hopefully I'll have something to show for it by the end of summer, that's if the slugs haven't completely ravaged them by then which they seem intent on doing at the moment.

At the other end of the plot by the horseradish the cornfield mix is doing better. No need to sow this again, it's happily self-seeded from last year with the usual mix of corncockles, field poppies and corn marigolds; the purple one at the bottom left is the perennial Phacelia bolanderi, another plant that's popular with the bees:

I've also been growing a few flowers to add to the ox-eye daisies in the orchard. A couple of weeks ago I planted out some tufted vetch - which had only reached the size of small plugs so are struggling a bit - this week it's the turn of some potentilla which I've grown using some saved seed from my back garden. Before you say anything I know they're not a wild flower and they won't come true from seed either but it hardly matters. And besides, I stole the idea after reading about how someone had done it in Gardens Illustrated, and if it's good enough for them then it's good enough for me.

I know I know this should be done in autumn but the ground is sodden at the moment and the plants are fairly beefy so I reckon they'll be right.

No really it's November

More flower power

Buzzing

There seems to have been an explosion in the population of hoverflies this week, to add to the bees and butterflies: