Wings

Phew! That was a hot Bank Holiday weekend - how lovely to spend hours in the sunshine on the allotment again. I was pleased with this photo of a recently hatched Cinnabar moth. I particularly like the cape-like wings on this specimen.

I’d normally post this to my Allotment Wildlife Blog, but Cinnabar moths have been posted on there at least twice before; they’re a regular visitor. It’s the first one I’ve seen this year, but I'm sure many more will follow. My camera’s macro was really behaving this weekend.

These are the baby strawberries in the polytunnel - as a result of Jamie's paintbrush pollination (or maybe the abundance of flying insects in there).

And this is a Cardinal beetle - another regular on the wildlife blog as they’re so impressive. They’re not a plot enemy either.

Ok, that’s it for the macro shots. Here’s a sunny shot of our irises by the pond. Notice the may in the hedgerow, a bit later than usual this year, but still May.

I’m pleased that all the squash germinated. I started digging the trenches in the squash tunnel but only got 1metre done as this weekend was too hot for digging like that! 5 more metres to go... well, the plants have more growing to do - I'll just need to feed them prior to planting out as their modules are a bit small.

Our two Rocky cucumbers germinated too. We’re protecting them for the timebeing, we know how slugs enjoy a cucumber seedling!

I earthed-up the potatoes in bags yesterday and added a bit of potato fertiliser for good measure. We were both doing a lot of weeding and tidying - getting rid of the crazy grass edges, it makes such a difference and reduces the slug protection. I dug out some of the thistles from the HAHA wildlife plot, I know they’re good for birds and insects but we need to consider the neighbouring plots and they are rather invasive. It’s definitely greening up and the plants in the bog garden are slowly spreading.

We sowed the Scarlet Empire runner beans and Lingua di Fuoco 2 climbing borlotto beans into modules. The runner bean poles are up and I’m going to use wigwams for the borlotto and Gigantes.

The earth looks very dry, but it’s still wet under the surface. We’re still surviving on rhubarb, but look at this added luxury we had from Ivan on Sunday - it was so delicious! Thanks Ivan!

So that’s the end of the month of May. I'm looking forward to a few days off work this week - allotment all the way, hopefully. The song is by Birdy, because of the cinnabar moth.