05/10/2025
Gardening on the Other Side of the Fence - no.27 (Eastry Village News Oct 2025.
No sooner had I hit the ‘send’ button for the last article, mentioning how much of the country were imposing hosepipe bans, than we promptly had an extremely wet July with 146mm against a 30 yr average of 47.36mm. And then an extremely dry August with 13.5mm v the average 50.68mm.
But having visited Devon and Somerset they both missed any significant rain in the same period although not when we were there !
The results of this year’s Big Butterfly Count have just been released and were surprisingly disappointing but I had seen far more prior to the reporting period that they use. However I have identified 150 species of moth in the garden so far this year compared to a previous best of 131.
One new species of bird, Bullfinch, takes the garden list to 30 and last week there were a pair of Greenfinches, the first since autumn 2022.
One other new visitor is one that divides garden owners, whether you are wildlife-friendly or not. A single badger arrived in August. In my previous garden, in Surrey, we backed onto a railway line and there was a sett about 250 metres away and they used to visit to drink from the pond and pick up fallen fruit from a large wild cherry tree. But they did no other damage. However a neighbout 4 gardens down returned from hoilday and said he thought the England rugby team had held a training session on his lawn ! Here we are getting a fair bit of digging and rooting around in the wilder, orchard/meadow part of the garden but, so far, nothing more.
Because of the drier weather earlier in the year, the meadow hasn’t grown so much and there is noticeably less grass to deal with now we are cutting down one section at a time. The current trend in garden meadow management (as opposed to production for hay) is to leave some part of the meadow uncut through the winter to allow butterflies etc complete their life-cycles undisturbed.
I have mentioned the use of the word ‘Rewilding’ before related to gardening, but I am currently reading a book called ‘Renaturing’ (by James Canton,available from Kent Libraries) and I like the use of that term for the type of gardening that I am doing. Certainly some types of moth that have appeared use plants and shrubs that I have planted so the impact you can have can be seen. We have had a second old tree die this year, an old Morello cherry. But as before I will be leaving it in situ as it is still the most used perching area for all the small birds that pass through. Despite most of the info that Green Woodpeckers feed mostly on the ground looking for ants, there was one in this old tree last winter so hopefully it will return for some years to come as the tree continues to decay.
Jeff, the Bee-Friendly Gardener
