Although it wasn't that warm last night I was happy to see some of our local bats out and about. Don't know what type of bats they are but we often get quite a lot hunting over our garden. 
I'd ideally like to find out what they are and see if there is anything we can do to help with boxes etc. 

I'll try and post a video I took last night but might take me a while to sort it out.

(Why yes, I am a fan of Eddie Izzard...)

The only place in my garden that attracts bees at the moment is a monstrous pyrocantha that hums like a hive in the sunlight but is too tall for me to get photos. However here are some other bee pics from last year:

This, I think, is a red mason bee, taken in late March last year. I have some red mason bee cocoons coming next spring to release into my garden, so I need to plant some spring flowers for them!

   

And from July last year, a honeybee on viper's bugloss - I just planted a couple of these wildflowers in my front garden.

   

Both taken with an iPhone 7 Plus, using the Camera+ app's macro function.

This group is proving as elusive as my avatar! (which is a Scarlet Pimpernel, in case you hadn't guessed from my thread title)

Hello again, folks! Here's hoping we're settled down at last. It feels rather appropriate to be rebooting this group the same summer as I'm rebooting my veggie patch. I'm hoping to have lots of photos of yummy crops to share in coming months!

We have a 'happy' thread so I thought we should have a 'sad' thread .  We aren't bubbly and smiling all the time.  This isn't a place to rant about the world but perhaps to air a feeling of less than happy, hopefully it won't be used overmuch. 

Likes on this thread are "sympathy" likes.

I'll start it off:

Out planting in the spitty rain I looked at the pear trees, a conference type and a comice type.  Earlier in the month it looked like the fruit had set ok, then we had a heatwave and drought interspersed with high winds.  Now looking at both trees I can't see a single fruit.  Such a shame.

hi I bought 2 of these chillis at the start of lockdown they have both produced loveLy large red chillis about 4” long, they say they are hot but I need about 3-4 for a good curry or chilli con carne.

They have both started producing little white flowers, just wondering if this would help any of our resident chilli experts identify them.

   

Hi all,

I know rhubarb isn't exactly a fruit, but, like the section title, it is "fruity"...

We have this very well established rhubarb on the plot. I think the base of it must be about 1.5 ft in diameter. It is apparently a Timperley Early. It wasn't planted by the previous plotholder and seems to have been there for quite some time. It gave a great crop early on, and now has these rather less robust stalks (hopefully) keeping it going.

   

I know they like a good feed at the end of the season. I'm wondering if we should also consider splitting it later in the year. Advice and opinions welcome.

Thanks as ever!

Edit to say: It is also in a bindweed-heavy area of the plot, and you can see some infiltrating weeds in there. If we don't split it, any advice about ridding it of these interlopers would also be appreciated.

Hi all,

Do I need to do any earthing up for yellow onions? They seem to be growing ok, but the contour of the very top of the bulb seems to be showing from some. I've attached a photo, but it doesn't really show the best example!

   

Thanks for your help!

I have a fabulous wisteria trained against a wall - my boys gave  it to me for Christmas several year ago. But even though it looks gorgeous in May it soon drops all the flowers and the foliage is pretty boring whole summer. 
I have to keep it in check a lot throughout the summer as it's by my kitchen door. It's very vigorous.

I was wondering if I could grow a clematis through it? Anyone seen one?  Obviously a Montana wouldn't work but I thought a viticella that gets pruned down low once a year would be fine. What do you think?

Next year I plan to try out one chilli.  Never grown them before, don't use them much but there is such enthusiasm from those that do grow them, I'm keen to give it a try. 

So which variety should I go for, I want a low to medium heat and easy to grow.  The freebie seeds with the mag included 'cayenne' which calls itself medium heat, would they  be a good place to start?  Especially as they are free

Its a long story, pull up a chair!
We moved to this house nearly 40 years ago. It had a normal sized back garden backing onto an old orchard that was used for grazing horses.  I always wanted that orchard even though the trees were in need of care, falling over, top heavy, unpruned for decades and chewed by horses - but all I could do was watch, as the trees fell and the brambles grew and the horses pushed the falling trees over.
25 years ago  (1995) we both had the chance of voluntary redundancy with pensions paid early. After much thought (about 10 minutes) we decided to stop working for others, pay off the mortgage with our redundancy payouts and live more frugally on a much lower income.(not that we did!).
I'd always wanted to keep chickens, my OH wanted bees, so we decided to ask the landowner if he would rent us a bit of the orchard so that we could fulfil our dreams. To our surprise he agreed to a 12 month lease to a bit of land behind our garden with the proviso that he could redeem it at any time. This doubled the size of the garden, gave us a few old fruit trees and along came the chickens and 4 hives. 
For 10 years we tended that land, surreptitiously planting a few more fruit trees and hoping that the owner wouldn't notice and object. 

Then, in 2005 everything changed. My OH was diagnosed with cancer and we were given an option to buy the orchard and another piece of land beyond it. I knew I had to buy it so, whilst I cared for my OH I was also negotiating the land purchase. I lost my OH a few weeks before I bought the land. This isn't a sob story, and I'm not looking for sympathy - its a long time ago now.  The point of telling you this is that, suddenly, my garden had tripled in size and I was the only one around to care for it.

As you can imagine, I couldn't and a lot of it was reclaimed by nature. Freed from the horses's mouths and hooves , the wild flowers returned, including the "ugly" daffodils that grew here many years before.
The hedgerow was full of birds, saplings sprouted, the brambles threatened world domination and it was a struggle to reach the end of the garden.

Now, 15 years later, with the help of a lot of friends and some tree surgeons, its becoming my sort of garden. It'll never be neat and tidy, no straight rows  and many people wouldn't even see a garden, just a wilderness. My neighbours' have lawns and grow grass, I grow food for humans and wildlife and a lot of contentment. I wouldn't swap with them, ever!

The End.

Photos to follow.