For any other Cothigardeners, like Fiona, who were efficient enough to mark the diary, you’ll see that today, Wednesday December 15th was due to have been our pre-Christmas get together and lunch.

Sadly, that’s been off the agenda for a long time now, but given the ongoing state of restrictions which will certainly stretch into the early part of 2021, Elena and Fiona have made a valiant effort at coming up with a revised possible programme for the early part of 2021, which was to have been filled with a bumper selection of visiting speakers, since it’s the tenth anniversary year of the founding of the club by Yvonne and Colin and friends.

The early meetings for 2021 are now planned to be Zoom events, which whilst not being accessible to all, at least gives the opportunity for some members to interact in a remote way!

For anyone unfamiliar with ZOOM,  you do need to download the ZOOM app in advance onto your device, and you’re then sent a personal secure code, which you’ll need to use to allow you to join the meeting on the night.

We will email anyone hoping to be part of these meetings more details in due course.

The programme, below, is still a little tentative so do please bear with it, and look out for more notifications from Elena when physical meetings or even garden visits can take place again:

Kari Astri – “Water, shade, clay and weeds” – Date to be confirmed.
How this gardener is still learning to embrace and love her garden, (and most of the things that dwell within it).
Many of us don’t inherit a garden that is a blank space. We may have our own ideas and planting preferences, but how the garden develops is also shaped by what is already there. I’ll be sharing thoughts on gardening, planting and some new favourite plants from the last few years spent working on the ongoing project that is our quarter-acre garden in Wiltshire.
Kari has already visited and talked to Cothigardeners twice before in recent years, so we’re really delighted that she’s offered to give us a new talk via Zoom, at very short notice.

Wednesday, 17th February 7.30pm ZOOM meeting
Dr. Lizzie Wilberforce – title still to be announced. Lizzie has over 10 years experience as the conservation manager for the reserves of the Wildlife trusts of South West wales, and is always an interesting speaker, with her background as an ecologist. She’s recently changed jobs and is now working as Nature Reserves Project officer for Plantlife Cymru. We’re very grateful for her stepping into this February slot at short notice.

Wednesday, 17th March 7.30pm ZOOM meeting.
Philip Aubury – “The answer lies in the soil”. Good gardening starts here. Soil improvement, fertilisers and compost making.
Philip’s career started as a Nurseryman, then lecturer, Parks Manager until he finally became Director of Birmingham Botanical Gardens in 1987. He retired in 2007.

Wednesday, 21st April 7.30pm ZOOM meeting
Julian Wormald (from Cothigardeners!) – “Wildflowers, Meadows and Gardens – challenging ideas for more naturalistic gardens.”
This will look at various aspects of wildflower hay meadows – their biodiversity, aesthetics, creation, ecology and management; and contrast this very briefly (since this is a time reduced zoom talk) with currently trendy “pictorial” meadows. Finally, it’ll consider how we can learn from wildflower hay meadows to develop more naturalistic and diverse plant based communities in our gardens. This section mainly focuses on our grass free multicultural meadow terrace garden: how it’s developed over 20 years, is maintained and changes through the seasons.

Lots of ideas for people to think about as our gardens are springing into life.

Wednesday, 19th May 7.30pm ZOOM meeting
Stephen Anderton – “Courageous Gardening”
A fresh approach to gardening. Stephen investigates gardeners’ techniques, ideas and inspiration, in everything, from breeding and pruning to planting and design. He shows remarkable gardens from all over the world and explains how their makers have single-mindedly planned and created exciting effects. The many unconventional ideas on offer here make this one of his most popular lectures.
Stephen is the long-standing garden writer for the Times, as well as a lecturer and author. Trained originally in Drama and then Landscape Design, he worked in historic gardens where, latterly as National Gardens Manager for English Heritage, he was responsible for several major restoration projects. Discovering Welsh Gardens was published in 2009; his official biography Christopher Lloyd, His Life at Great Dixter appeared in March 2010 and Lives of the Great Gardeners in 2018.

For those keen on outside visits, Elena has plans for these possible visits for later in the year when the weather improves – further details to follow :

Helen Warrington, Ty Cwm Nursery – An open air talk at her nursery.
Bob Brown – A visit to his garden for a guided tour.
Garden Safari – Visits to our very own Cothi Gardeners members gardens.

Plus if we’re not allowed back into the hall for a longer period:

The possibility of an outdoor cinema in the grounds of Coronation Hall

A film: ‘Flicker and Pulse – A year in an English garden’

A striking and poignant portrayal of time passing in a beautiful English walled garden. Using real-time and time-lapse footage, the film explores the relationship between the seasons and the plants and people who work within the walls of the garden. The Beeches, Barcombe is an 18th Century house with 8 acres of land and gardens which include the 300 year old lovingly restored walled garden in which the film was shot.

Dr. Lizzie Wilberforce (our February speaker) has sent a link to a survey she’s created on how people view wildlife, and visits they might make to nature reserves – in particular the local Plantlife Cymru reserve at Cae Blaen-dyffryn, click here to view, which is located beside the Pumsaint to Lampeter road. It only takes a couple of minutes to complete, but if you’re able to, do please have a go – it’ll provide useful insights for Lizzie and Plantlife into how much we all know about, and use this lovely orchid rich site. Please click here to complete the survey.

It’s a bit early to be planning garden visits for 2021, given the time of year, and changing Covid restrictions, but the National Gardens Scheme (NGS) has many local gardens due to be opening by arrangement to visitors next year. We’re still lucky to have 3 lovely nearby Cothigardeners’ gardens which will be open to visit under the NGS next year:

John and Helen at Ty’r Maes (April to October)

Brenda and Alan at Bwlchau duon (June to August)

Julian and Fiona at Gelli Uchaf (January to October).

Click here to find the complete listing of gardens in Wales which are opening in this way, with pictures and details of all the gardens involved.

Finally, to finish this rather long post, and as flagged up to members by Elena in her recent email, this is going to be my last post as website manager. 😊👍😢 (Take your pick!)

After 2 years as chair of Cothigardeners followed immediately by 2 years doing the website, it’s time for a bit of a break, and for the club to have a different input on things. You’ll see that I’m going to surface again anyway with a ZOOM talk in April, which I hope you’ll be interested in, and am still going to be doing my own blog and website, but I need a bit of a break from too much screen and keyboard work, which has anyway been increasing for another project.

For all of you quiet, retiring folk who haven’t yet volunteered to Elena to take over the website, do please give it some thought, and make a positive new year resolution, and tackle a new challenge. It’s great fun, keeps the brain cells working and I’m happy to talk anyone through how it’s done, having done this with 3 other people already, to set up or run their own blogs, and who all got the hang of it in a couple of hours or less.

I’m always here as a back up adviser/problem solver, as indeed are the clever “Happiness Engineers” at WordPress, who are only a click away if anything untoward happens – it rarely does, believe me.

Plus, you’ll have the satisfaction of deciding what to include, and then seeing how many people read or look at what you put up on the web. I see that over the last 2 years, about 1500 people per annum from 42 different countries have seen a little about what’s going on in Pumsaint!

I started our own website as a complete computer technophobe. The fact that I’m still going after 10 years, and well over half a million words, shows how easy it is, and how much I value doing it, both as a way of creating a record, spreading information, and as a stimulus to finding out new things.

Thanks to everyone for looking at anything I’ve churned out over the last 2 years, and for everyone who’s sent me anything to include on this website. Fiona and I send everyone our very best wishes for a happy and peaceful Christmas, and hope to see you soon in 2021. (And thanks to Fiona for creating the wintry images for this post).

Nearly a month has passed from the last update, and although Wales is now out of extreme lock down, and people can travel more freely, indoor meetings still seem to be a fair way off.

Hopefully all members have been keeping busy over the last few weeks, but not much information from members has reached me over the last few weeks, (!) which is why I’ve held off posting for this length of time.

(Eryngium alpinum)

Many thanks to Yvonne who sent me this …

Have you heard of Love Orchids? They’re based in New Milton, near Bournemouth. They used to supply the supermarkets, but when lock down came, that all halted, so they started selling direct to the public.

These arrived promptly. They all have 2 spikes, and were well packed. 

I’ve had a request from a member who’s asked me if other Cothi members have had any landscaping work done by Eynon Price based near Llandeilo, since she’s planning a major redesign of her garden. If anyone has any feedback about Eynon that they’d like to share, if they send it to me, I can forward it on to Jane.  Thanks. Cothigardeners@gmail.com

Members may have picked up that some Welsh NGS gardens are now opening, though   with some necessary restrictions thanks to the Covid pandemic.  Here at Gelli Uchaf we hope to have our first socially distanced visitors this weekend after a delay because of changing weather forecasts. John and Helen are also now opening, as we are, by prior arrangement only.

The full list of bookable NGS garden visits are accessible here. Sadly such visits won’t for now have teas or the same amount of social interaction as previously. Equally it will mean that visits are likely to be much quieter and more private, so brilliant for peacefully appreciating the gardens. Plus of course, as before, they’ll help to raise funds for the mainly nursing charities which the NGS supports.

We had our own private guided tour of John and Helen’s garden last week, on a rare trip out for us, and it’s looking stunning and has recovered really well after the late frosts which hit some of the Magnolias hard. We also did a bit of mutual plant swapping – a trade of some Sorbus seedlings from the Hergest trip last year for many perennial delights from John’s garden. Thanks John and Helen. Well worth a visit for any who haven’t been for a while.

Here the rather mixed bag of weather of late has caused challenges with making hay, though the upside to this is the meadow flowers are looking lovelier than ever this year.

Rambling roses which looked stunning towards the end of June have been brought to an abrupt end by all the damp grey conditions, but our apples have never looked as good, and after the very dry spring the foliage still seems to be in surprisingly good shape in spite of the dreary July weather.

The RHS recently posted a great short video on thinning apples. I never used to bother doing this when the apple trees were small. I couldn’t bear losing fruit. But it really does make a difference to the quality of a crop, and also helps to prevent biennial cropping where a tree produces so much one year, it takes a year off the following season to recover. It’s not too late to do this, as this video explains. The other way of looking at it is that you should pick off all the fruit and diseased fruitlets anyway to limit disease in subsequent years, so removing excess numbers now, saves picking time later.

With limits on options for travelling for many people, I thought I’d share a link to Gardening Masterclass zoom sessions. This has been spun out of a physical programme of events which were planned to take place throughout this summer with some of the most well known gardeners and designers from the UK, and further afield. Obviously the physical events have been cancelled, but Annie Guilfoyle and Noel Kingsbury who set up this concept decided to go online with it.

This You Tube link explains more about it, and then switches to an hour long discussion with Fergus Garrett from Great Dixter, widely regarded as one of the greatest English gardens, into how he’s coping with the challenges of the pandemic, and how he designs and creates the amazing displays there. If you can bear the sometimes dodgy video images, where internet speeds are clearly a bit poor, it’s worth a look.  It’s just one of many such pieces currently available, which might give us all an alternative viewing option for a wet July evening.

I shan’t include any video footage of the other 2 honeybee swarms that have moved in over the last month, but the short video clip shows just how much honey bees seem to appreciate the pollen in opium poppies.

This particular stunning form was given to us as seed by Jane and Ivor Stokes years ago, but being a poppy has decided not to appear for a few years now. This year we have just two plants, but the bees adore the pollen so much, that even with just a single flower open at any one time, half a dozen will try to cram in at the same time. Whether the pollen is laced in any way, isn’t clear, but I have discovered that it’s only the pollen they’re after. Apparently all poppies lack nectaries, so don’t produce any nectar.

It’s been estimated that a typical wild honey bee colony will need to harvest about 20 kg of pollen to sustain it over a season, so every little helps. A commercial hive may need 50 % more than this. Since a bee with well loaded pollen sacs will only carry about 15 mg per trip, that means 1.3 million pollen foraging trips per season to collect the weight of pollen needed!  So the more pollen laden flowers around, the better.

We’re just coming to the end of The Bees Needs Week 2020 organised by Bumblebee Conservation Trust. Again, no physical events this year, but click here for more information on how it’s vital we all grow appropriate flowers to help support our pollinators.  Their 5 top suggestions for helping are :

1. Grow more flowers, shrubs & trees

2. Let it grow wild

3. Cut grass less often

4. Don’t disturb insect nests and hibernation spots

5. Think carefully about whether to use pesticides

Finally, as always, it would be lovely to hear from members about their favourite plants, or things in their gardens as we go through the next few months. Why not write a few words and send an image or two, preferably resized down to less than 1 MB? I can’t promise to put everything up online immediately, but usually within a fortnight, and it’s a great way of keeping in touch and passing on information.

Or use the Cothigardeners Facebook Page.

You can send things to me at:

Cothigardeners@gmail.com

Thanks again to Yvonne for contributing to this post.

We’re now over 12 weeks into our Covid induced lock down, and still getting used to life with very limited social interaction, and severe restrictions on travel. Although yesterday the First Minister of Wales, Mark Drakeford did lay out the first signs of a relaxation, with all shops potentially opening on Monday and outdoor non contact sports being allowed, the 5 mile limit on travel stays in place for now. All hospitality also remains shut down still, though with a hint that this may be relaxed by mid July.

Regrettably, with this in mind, July’s meeting with Helen Warrington has also now been cancelled. Elena (who very frustratingly, currently has no computer access thanks to a BT mess up) has asked me to pass on that she’s currently thinking that as an option for August, with further relaxation of travel restrictions in the offing, it may be possible to hold some sort of arranged-at-short-notice outdoor event to replace what would have been our summer social event…

Watch this space for updates as we get closer to the time, and keep your fingers crossed for the weather.

________

Many thanks to Elena for sending me this information on what’s clearly been a big summer lock down project for her and Andy in their garden :

I have been planning this pond for a while and ‘lockdown’ has provided me with the opportunity to ‘get it done’!

Last month my neighbour, James, used a mini digger to scrape off the grass in a ‘dead’ grassy area and dig the pond, well not really a pond, more of a dry riverbed ending in a puddle 🙂
James then provided and put down the underlay and pond liner for me … it’s amazing what some people have in their shed, sorry James, workshop!

I then proceeded to fill it with stones from our river – thank goodness for empty dog and pig food bags… I filled these and Andy trailered them up to the house.

Because I chose to site the pond on top of a rubble dumping ground, I had to create bog areas (mini ponds) around the main pond for boggy plants, some of which I purchased from Jan and Phil at Rhoslwyn Plants. I can report that they have had a fantastic spring witnessed by loads of empty shelves!

Thanks to my visit to Farmyard Nursery last month, Richard was able to produce a pond pump to create a mini waterfall. I repurposed some of my pottery efforts to ‘tune’ the flow to good effect I think.

Tina, John and Helen and Brenda supplied me with pond weed and tadpoles and thanks to them my pond is now attracting birds, and bees for a drink. Andy identified a nuthatch! and soooo exciting, the first frog has taken up residence this week.

I have been trying all sorts of plants in the very shallow pond, propped up with stones, and Brenda and I have a started on a grocery purchased watercress challenge to see who can actually get it to grow in the pond! Yes she has a new pond too, come on Brenda, show us your pond!

As you can see, I have been having fun, even resorting to planting Hostas in hanging baskets, quite fetching I think 🙂

My only real problem with the pond is that as fast as I ‘arrange’ the stones to hide the liner, my little next door neighbour, Charlotte, comes over for a visit and happily throws them into the pond – well that is what stones and water are for, bless her!

Meanwhile, Andy has been busy in the polytunnel growing food!

While I have not been able to see you all, the garden really keeps me connected to you. That rose from Gwenda… (after a bit of ferreting, Julian and Fiona think that’s it’s called “Goldfinch”, and is a modest sized rambler, with almost no thorns – they have one too – thanks to Gwenda!).

… the ‘lifted’ canopy idea from Yvonne, that Achillea from Ann Large, the woodland plant (name still to learn) from Fiona and Julian. (Daphne bholua…) My pond has sooo much of Cothi members’ advice and generosity associated with it. The baby Gunnera from Angela and Martin a few years ago, that has been split twice and is still huge. Yeah, I know the baby Gunnera (split number three) beside the pond, in an artificial bog, will grow too big, but what the heck, it looks so lovely and tropical and connects me with my roots. Thank you all, you lovely Cothi Gardening people … see you soon!

Maybe for an open air meeting in August if Mr Dreadful oops, Mr Drakeford permits.

___________

Thanks too for this update from Ann and Anthony on their own lock down project this year:

Hi All, I am posting a few photos of our Spring Lockdown Project, which was two raised beds.

In which I have so far planted First Early potatoes to try and avoid potato blight, hopefully we’ll have eaten them all before it strikes! Also Spring Cornwall cabbage – we had an invasion of caterpillars at the weekend, so I spent a few hours removing them, before too much damage was done. The rhubarb had a setback with the frost, but is now looking much better.

Can’t say that for the Rhododendrons, I always have a photo taken on my birthday standing by them, not this year!

Looks like some serious cherry harvesting has been going on at Tina and Derek’s – thanks for the lovely photo …

Meanwhile thanks to Colin for sending me this photo of a Dark Green Fritillary butterfly,  Speyeria aglaja, which he found in the garden. Click here for more on its life cycle.

Meanwhile in our own garden I spotted two exotic looking Scarlet Tiger moths,  Callimorpha dominula . Click here for more and why it gets its name.

With lock down limits on activity continuing for a while, there’s maybe still time to plan a big project for your garden. How about being inspired by the short video below, which some of you may have already seen, and thanks to Richard Bramley for sharing it on facebook – well worth a watch!

It’s headed “So you’ve been in quarantine for 3 months. What have you been up to?… Nothing much…”

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10157145563191957&id=627541956

Finally, after talking about drones sounding like a bee swarm last time, as they head off or back from mating flights I can now offer a comparison, from this Monday.

By good fortune I was able to witness and film the entire process, beginning with “scout” bees checking out a hive all morning (filmed as ten second time lapse photos over 3 hours). Interestingly the scouts nearly all disappear from the hive over the last 4 seconds of this shortened clip (15 minutes of real time). They’ve flown back to direct the swarm cluster, sitting somewhere on a branch to the West of us, to this their newly selected home.

This second clip condenses the whole swarm arrival down, from about half an hour from first arrival, to them nearly all making their way inside. An amazing process to watch and hear – just look at the last few seconds and you’d have no idea of what had gone on before.

…

Finally, as always, it would be lovely to keep hearing from members about their favourite plants, or things in their gardens as we go through the next few months. Why not write a few words and send an image or two, preferably resized down to less than 1 MB? I can’t promise to put everything up online immediately, but usually within a fortnight, and it’s a great way of keeping in touch and passing on information.

Or use the Cothigardeners Facebook Page.

You can send things to me at:

Cothigardeners@gmail.com

Thanks again to all who have contributed to this post.