Update

Well, despite regular calendar reminders to update this I keep forgetting! Which is a pity as there is lots going on in the garden at the moment.

1) Bumble Bees - we can haz them! Which is good because they're a bit endangered in the UK at the moment, but we always have a few buzzing around. Sue did the BBC Springwatch BioBlitz the other weekend and found we had more than one species of them.

2) Pond - I pulled out some of the more rampent weeds from the pond to open up some water, much to the annoyence of one of the newts! Going carefully through the weeds I pulled out to make sure any creatures got back into the pond I found a HUGE dragonfly lava which has clearly been lurking among the weeds for a couple of years and must be pretty much fully grown. We get damsel flies over the pond but I've not seen a dragonfly...though this beastie means we must have them now and again

3) Bird Boxes - again, no use of either box this year. This is odd as they're in a good place according to the books but not of interest to the birds. We did have a blackbird nesting in the hedge this year though, as we had a few juvenile blackbirds appear on the lawn one day hopping around and getting the hang of this flying lark! Also no sign of our custom-made, built in bat box being used..again..

4) Hedge - all new planting from a couple of years ago has got away in a manner which can only be called 'rampant', might even get some sloes on the sloe bush.

The only slight disappointment is that there has been no sign (or sound) of hedgehogs yet this year - but I'm optimistic we will hear them at some stage.

Frogspawn!

I went down the garden on Sunday, while cleaning out the terrapin tank, and saw that the pond was well supplied with frog spawn. There had been none earlier in the week so it must have been laid in the previous couple of days. Then later in the day there were loads of mating frogs so there is now even more! The only problem is that we've had a cold snap this last day and the pond has frozen - let's hope some of it has survived, the opinion online seems to be that generally some of the spawn survives freezing even though a lot doesn't. Keep you posted...

Birds

After a depressing year in which birds seemed almost absent from the garden there seem to be quite a few around at the moment. The months of wet weather last year seemed to have resulted in the birds not showing themselves and I was worried that the population had plummetted as the feeders were essentially just going mouldy where they hung. But at the moment both feeders are being visited again and over the past couple of days we've had chaffinches, great tits, and long tailed tits about. With any luck a drier year this year might get our numbers back up again..though it costs me more in wild bird food; my loss is the RSPB shop's gain of course! It would be nice if the bird boxes I put up last year are used this season

The pond is unfrozen but needs a good clean up, and plans to replant round the back of it must be a priority this year, as is the planting of more service station plants generally. No sign of Ash dieback in our hedge, which doesn't have a lot of Ash trees but there are a few mixed in with the other stuff. I'd like to get some holly in there somewhere, there are gaps...

Bright and sunny

The warm weather has really kicked the garden into life, with stuff coming up all over. The new hedging plants have all come into bud so I've had 100% survival over the winter and with an entire growing season now they've got their roots down I'm hoping for some serious growth this year. The frog-spawn has hatched into tadpoles, though we do have an iminent hosepipe ban in prospect so we may be topping up the pond with buckets as filling domestic ponds is banned - though the water board do say they make an exception for filling fish ponds. I've emailed them, copied to our local wildlife trust, to see if that exemption extends to wildlife ponds in domestic gardens...and if not why not? With garden ponds being so vital for wildlife these days I would have thought there was a strong case for it.

I also saw the first bats airborne this week, which is always good :-)

Mad as a pond full of frogs..

And the pond has been FULL of frogs this weekend, we've been counting somewhere between 10 and 15 at any one time, all croaking away. There only seems to be one clump of frog spawn as yet, which makes us wonder if there are a lot of males and only one female in the pond. But everywhere you look there are frogs, on the weed, under the weed, swimming around...  In previous years we've been quite worried about the number of tadpoles which do not metamorphose properly into frogs, but clearly there must have been quite a number which did given how many have returned as adults. We also got a brief view of a newt in there today, probably trying to avoid being squished by amourous frogs I should think. We've had newts consistantly for a couple of years now, though the eggs are hard to spot and newt-poles very furtive, so we don't know if they're breeding. They're common newts, and none the worse for that, including a male who does look very handsome!

Kit also had a hornet sighting in the tree house today. I trust him to identify it correctly because he's seen a hornet before and is unlikely to confuse it with a queen wasp. I'm sorry I missed it because they're such spectactular insects, though I hope it was only foraging and not looking to nest because we don't really have anywhere which can take a hornet nest safely and I'd hate to have them exterminated as they're so amazing and still quite rare - though numbers are up now. Over in the water park my mate Will says they always 'lose' a few bat boxes every year to nesting hornets. So as long as they don't nest, they're welcome to forage here any time.

No sign of any of the birds taking an interest in the new nest boxes yet, but it's still early days for that. But there are loads of them hitting the feeders still so I'm hopeful that the blue tits will make use of them.

Annoying the frogs and cutting the hedge

Over the last couple of days the pond has become alive with frogs, loads of them croaking and making out for all they're worth. I'm guessing that the warm weather has bought them out. We had lots of frog spawn last year, which turned into lots of tadpoles, however a lot of them never turned into frogs, though guessing by the sheer number of them which have turned up last week a fair number must have done so!

The problem is that the pond was really in need of a clear out, with planting baskets overflowing, mare's tail clogging the surface and a shortage of clear water, so with the sudden frog influx the only option was to clean it out today. Even with my pond gloves on the water was very cold, so how the frogs manage I don't know! I pulled out bucket loads of unwanted foliage and root mass, and disposed of a couple of the more overgrown baskets entirely. It looks a bit barren at present but it will look all the better for it in a couple of months. Now the frogs can lay as much frog spawn as they want without me having to disturb it further.

The other thing I've been doing is to do some serious cutting back on the hedge which the council decided last year was mine. I cut it back on the pavement side quite hard so it doesn't come as near to the pavement, which means that this year it can grown back in quite thickly without overhanging the footpath. I also tried half cutting through and bending over a seedling ash tree because frankly I don't want an ash tree there...but I could live with, and in fact encourage, a bushing ash if the bulk of it was back nearer the hedge itself. There's loads of bun on the hawthornes which have so much more room now the hedge has been thinned out as it was last summer too. I've bought a couple of bird boxes to put up in some of the taller trees in the hedge so I'll have to get those put up soon. Quite a lot of stuff is showing buds beginning to break, so spring is definitely on the way.

Now the warm weather has come the birds are all over the feeders...in the cold weather when you'd expect 'em to want extra food they hardly showed up, now there are always birds on them: go figure.