Contents include:

• Sue’s Big Swim
• Cafe News
• Bees settle in to new homes
• The Autumn Social 2012 all the prizewinners and many great photos from the day
• Tarragon of Virtue catch up with the next instalment of our tense, romantic serial
• Sarah’s Winning Recipes
• Buried Treasure Mystery
• Shed competition

Click here to view/download this newsletter (PDF),

So many butterflies around – a bumper year as a boost to significant butterfly decline nationally due to habitat loss.. David Attenborough is encouraging us all to leave an area of garden for butterflies and moths. I’m doing my bit with the scabious, lavender, nepata and flowering majoram that attract all these beneficial pollinating insects..

In this warm, dry summer we’ve been having they’ve been covered with, butterflies, mostly meadow browns and skippers, but the occasional exotic peacock drops by – only to be chased off by the meadow browns – a case of the revenge of the little guys seeing off the alpha top-cats, like the corvids mobbing the kestrels!

Great excitement a few days ago as this gorgeous day flying 6 spot burnet alighted briefly among the leaves of my little apple tree – such a beautiful moth, described as, ‘generally lethargic and easily picked from flowers…strongly attracted to knapweed and scabious’. (Collins Guide to the Insects of Britain and Western Europe).

Earlier in the season the cinnabar moth was around on the plot and I’m now closely monitoring the progress of a single cinnabar moth caterpillar on my ragwort.. it’s growing well, now approx 2.5cm in length…

Update on the newts in the water bath – they seem to have gone now and it’s been reclaimed by the resident frogs, who shelter under the ‘ramp’ during the day, then emerge in the evening for their publicity shots, oblivious, like the newts to our pumping activity…

My plot neighbours are very tolerant of the amphibian habitat that’s been constructed in the bath, or perhaps they’re in the process of complaining to committee right now about having to share resources with these slippery customers….!

Contents include:

• Scouts visit to the plots
• What’s in our water? News of a study being carried out on the site
• Plotholders on Parade at the Hampton Wick Festival
• Swarm! Fred the beekeeper to the rescue!
• Dandelion wine – learn to love your weeds
• Memoirs of long-time plotholder George Loosemore

and the plot thickens as Mrs Maple is drawn further into the mysterious spate of crimes on the allotments….

Click here to view/download this Newsletter (PDF).

For some time now mare’s tail has been radiating out from plot 126 (where the Royal manure is currently being unloaded).

There appears to be no way to eradicate mare’s tail. I have read that it can go 12ft down. Apparently it’s one of the oldest plants in the world. The roots are difficult to distinguish and it is easy to miss some when digging it out. The longer you let it grow the stronger it gets. New plotholders may not be aware if they have inherited mare’s tail or even know what it is.

Rotavating must not be done as it will fragment the roots and a ‘Sorcerers Apprentice’ situation occurs.

Mare’s tail seems to have little effect on nearby crops though and, unsightly as it is, it can be kept under control by hoeing and digging. When it is not near your crops you can dig it out by shoving a spade straight down as far as you can go – about 3 or 4 inches away from it, levering beneath it before carefully easing it out. Sometimes you can get about a foot of root out if you are lucky. The more you get out the longer it takes to reappear, as reappear it will. If it is close to crops you will have to use a hoe or pull it out by hand.

Dry the roots and hoed tops and put them in a black bag or similar. Burn them later, do not put them on the compost heap!

Chemicals:
Someone told me one way to get rid of them was to:
Buy ‘Deep Root’ and mix it up in a pail with wallpaper paste, abrade (roughen) the mare’s tail tops and coat them afterwards using rubber gloves to splosh the paste on. Trying to abrade this tough plant is nigh on impossible, you are more likely to break it and exacerbate the situation and anyway this takes forever – and it still doesn’t work.

Use a new mixture called ‘Kurtail’. although expensive this did seem to work, but sorry to say the plot where it was used is showing signs of regrowth this year. Probably why they don’t call it ‘De-tail’. AC

Close up picture of mare’s tail

This drawing shows both the mature plant (1a) and the immature plant (1b). When immature the plant spreads via spores.

A load of manure from the Royal Stables has been put on plot 126, at the south-east corner of the allotments. This area is infested with mare’s tail, a weed that is almost impossible to eradicate.

Please do not take any of this manure if you have a plot anywhere else on the site, since it could well be contaminated and we are trying to limit the mare’s tail infestation to the south-east corner.

Please click here to read Ashley Catto’s article on mare’s tail.

We will clear an alternative area for manure deliveries, well away from the mare’s tail. This will be one of the tasks for the next Sunday work morning, which we are organising for Sunday August 3rd. Please come along and lend a hand – it’s for everyone’s benefit.

Plotholders’ Committee
July 2014

Have been enjoying the aerial displays of speed swooping and catching on the wing from a small group of swallows as they dive and hunt over the plots – several juveniles perched and preened last Thursday on Matt’s posts, still demanding food from hard working parents:

Lots of noisy shrieking and ‘feed me mum’ before they all swooped off again – no sign of them today so perhaps they’ve already headed south…

The juvenile robin is now a regular visitor as soon as I get the hoe or fork out – amazing how quickly it learns to recognise us as ‘tall pigs’ that rootle and unearth worms for it!

Obviously I didn’t provide food quickly enough and I was treated to a fine display of ‘shake a tail feather’!

A recent return from the greenfinches – for the past few years they’ve been affected by a nasty virus and not so many around – it’s important that we keep our bird feeders clean as greenfinches appear to be susceptible to infection…the colour always seems more yellow than green!

Masses of meadow browns and bees on the flowering marjoram, a big favourite and also a prolific self-seeder..

Who can identify between meadow browns and gate keepers – is it size? Pretty sure this is a meadow brown but the two look very similar:

There are still at least 2 newts in the holding tank – small ones so perhaps the others have already clambered out and are now lurking in the undergrowth – tiny frogs around the plot and this old ‘un, perched on the edge of the bath, quite unperturbed as I was pumping yesterday evening.. or perhaps it thought I wouldn’t see it if it sat perfectly still…

I thought this was an unusual fly – shiny, large body approx 1cm in width with the grand name of Volucella zonaria, found mainly in wooded areas – nectar feeders and particularly partial to umbellifers:

Cinnabar moth caterpillars in evidence on ragwort around the site – mine has disappeared and I’m hoping it’s now pupating rather than providing a bird snack. Ragwort has a bad reputation, deemed ‘injurious’ in the 1959 Weeds Act because of the alkaloids it contains that are toxic to livestock, particularly horses. John Clare eulogised it, describing its “shining blossoms”. But Buglife and other conservation bodies report that ‘the threats from ragwort ‘spread’ are exaggerated, and that it has an important role as the main food plant of at least 30 invertebrates, including bees, moths, beetles and hoverflies.’ (Rob Yarham Guardian Country Diary 01.18.14).

No sightings of swallows last week, only a demanding kestrel chasing a parent bird for food. So, farewell then, swallow fledglings and good luck with your incredible migration southwards…

I’m away for a week in darkest Dartmoor – please send in any wildlife pics, info or thoughts re RPA wildlife (of the non-human kind!)

Back from a week in Dartmoor, – vertiginous, roller coaster narrow country lanes and 1 in 4 hill starts testing out my nerves and car brakes! Almost the first butterfly I saw was this one – is it a silver washed fritillary, as it was foraging on bramble flowers? So many of them, fluttering around the laurel hedges and over the roof of my rental cottage, almost as big as small bats!

I stayed in a very quiet, attractive and comfortable cottage, Bramblemoor, overlooking the steeply wooded valleys of the river Dart – highly recommended for anyone wanting to get away to peace and quiet with the moors at the top of the hill. Visited a couple of wonderful gardens near Tavistock – can highly recommend the Garden House, apparently a favourite of Carol Klein’s.. a wonderful mix of wildflower meadows, naturalistic areas and immaculate perennial beds and bowling green paths…

Also a recently created gardens and nursery – Wild Side, close by, only open for a few days in the summer – out of a few acres of fields Keith Wiley has constructed a stunning and innovative planting style based on natural landscaping – “an experiment in new naturalism’.. really worth visiting if you’re in the vicinity, although it will be closed next year as he’s building a house!

Back on the plot and the wretched rats have had one of my squash and have started on the sweetcorn – grrr! Wouldn’t mind if they kept to the masses of dropped plums and apples… but cheered up by this lovely red admiral sunning itself..

The wasps have started collecting wood by scraping tiny amounts from our doors, benches and seats. It’s fascinating to watch them alight and get down to a bit of busy wisping…

The juvenile robin on my plot is already fiercely protecting it’s territory and seeing off mature robins, possibly the parents! Robins have started to sing a rather muted, low key song again after the annual moult – must be a very itchy and uncomfortable process, but good to hear them again..

A bumper year for butterflies – I lifted up a small terracotta flower pot to find a black, very hairy caterpillar installed – has anyone any idea what it might be?
Any ‘Archers’ listeners will have been hearing how the brown hairstreak may save David and Ruth Archers’ farm from being carved up by the new road planned to blight the locality – how great that a tiny insect can potentially thwart developments and roads that make inroads into our rapidly decreasing green areas, destroying habitats, woodlands and green spaces with yet more concrete and brick! I’m with you all the way, Linda Snell, right on, sister!

Back from another week in Dartmoor, enjoying the moors in between rain and ‘mizzle’ and an afternoon in the wonderful Tudor house and gardens at Cotehele. It’s the time of year for dragonflies to lay their eggs – my ‘better half’ took this one on the side of a pond, a bit of a ‘spot the dragonfly’ picture:

Apparently the hawker dragonfly lays its eggs into sheltered cracks and hollows on land. The eggs hatch into proto-larval worms with some mobility. The eggs lay dormant until next spring when the hatchings ‘will need to get a wiggle on’. (Derek Niemann, the Guardian 6.9.14) I’ve seen dragonflies flitting over our RPA site, maybe looking for a good laying location.