6 minute read
Gardens
Tulip planting time! Hopefully you’ve got all your other spring bulbs in by now, but tulips prefer the late start to avoid tulip fire blight. Tulips used to be mostly annual, but there’s now a lot more varieties which will go on growing year after year, so long as you look after the bulbs, so it’s worth looking out for them. If you’ve got heavy clay soil add a bit of gravel or organic matter to break it up before planting. The rule is twice the width of the bulbs apart and at least twice their height in depth.
rWinter bedding makes the garden look a bit more cheerful and there’s plenty of variety available, from winter flowering heather to winter flowering pansies, violas, and polyanthus. They may not all flower all the time, but given some decent periods of sun they’ll reward your endeavour.
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Insulate outdoor pots with bubble wrap and put them up on something – pot feet or bits of brick or even polystyrene - to stop them getting waterlogged. Overwatering is more likely to kill winter flowering plants than anything else. Putting containers flush with a wall will often offer greater protection – but then you also have to check that they don’t dry out! TOP TIP!
A cheap solar lamp for the greenhouse or a head light like climbers use may be a good investment, just so you can keep checking on outdoor plants during the short dark days without having to wrestle with a torch.
06/11/2018 18:16
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One bird to have increased dramatically in the Peak District and surrounding moors or heaths, is the stonechat. This used to be here only sporadically and was mainly a winter visitor to higher areas especially with extensive gorse Adult Male beds. Indeed, the more common Stonechat ‘chat’ was the whinchat, socalled after ‘whin’, gorse, or furze, though more often a bird sat atop bracken beds or similar habitats. Sadly, this species seems to have declined and is now rarely seen. On the other hand, the stonechat, called the Devil bird by country folk in times past, is ‘on the up’. The common names can get confusing though and for example, in Scotland, the stonechat with its jet black head and neck is known as the ‘blackcap’. This little bird, a cousin of the robin and the thrush, is a denizen of heaths and moors with a noticeable and distinctive repeated call, ‘u-tack, u-tack-tack’ a bit like two pebbles being brought sharply together. From being an uncommon winter visitor to the Peak District for example, the stonechat is now a regular breeder and a nice addition to the bird fauna for local walks. Lockdown earlier in the year with its reduction in recreational access, will have undoubtedly benefitted the stonechat, its upland cousin the wheatear, and the upland blackbird, or ring ouzel.
The persistent calls of the chat gave rise to superstitions and a folk rhyme goes, ‘Stane chack, Deevil tak’! They who harry my nest, Will, never rest, Will meet the pest, De’il break their lang back, Wha my eggs wad tak’, tak’!’ Because of the ceaseless c h a t t i n g (obviously talking incessantly to the Devil!), it was believed that with its bloodMale Ring Ouzel and red breast, the Dunnock stonechat was indeed the Devil’s bird. It was therefore protected and moreover, if you were so foolish as to take a stonechat’s eggs, then you could expect a dire fate. Indeed, for the deeply superstitious country folk of that time, this warming was effective protection.
Stonechats figure in Stonechat literary references too, for example, when W.H. Auden noted the bird in a poem. He described it as ‘a bird stonehaunting, an unquiet bird’, again reflecting its constant chattering. The Young Stonechat stonechat’s prominence and folklore reputation is because of this restless behaviour and the distinctive chatter delivered from prominent perches on gorse, bracken, or leggy heather. In constant conversation with the Devil, and believed to carry a drop of the devil’s blood, the devil would break the back of anyone who harmed a stonechat’s eggs. A little like its lowland cousin the robin, the stonechat is ever on the move. It has favourite perches in and around its moorland territory and these might be on a gritstone boulder, a prickly gorse bush, a spring of purple heather, or perhaps a tall bracken frond. It is from these positions that the bird produces its endless chatter and that family groups of a male, female, and perhaps three or four youngsters excitedly ‘taktak’ to each other. With the distinctive and in the case of the summertime male, very s t r i k i n g plumage, this is a bird which is hard to overlook. Female Ring Ouzel
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