Didsbury in Bloom 2018 – Judging Day

On Monday 9th and Tuesday 10th July Didsbury village is being judged by the RHS North West in Bloom judges. Last year Didsbury won both the Urban Community category and a Gold; so there are high expectations for Didsbury in Bloom 2018.

The road I live on, Ford Lane is one of the areas which is judged. We have a green at the top of the road and flower filled planters all the way down the lane. It looks lovely, but it doesn’t happen by magic; a team of hard-working residents lovingly maintain the planters and keep the lane looking good all year round.

Didsbury in Bloom 2018 - Judging Day

In the weeks running up to judging day, more residents do their bit by helping to tidy the green or water the planters outside their homes. I’m slowly trying to make our front garden more attractive, but it’s a slow process, not helped by the lack of rain.

Didsbury in Bloom 2018 had the twin themes of Remembrance and they also celebrated the centenary of women winning the right to vote. There has been a team of wonderful volunteers who have been working with schools to plant and maintain a poppy path running from Didsbury Park to School lane. The verges have been cleared and planted with poppy seeds which were harvested from the fields in France, then scattered by school children. In bloom they are a lovely, arresting sight. It’s well worth taking a detour to wander down the lane to see the poppies and remember them.

Didsbury in Bloom 2018 - Judging Day

2018 has been a challenging year for gardeners, especially over the last few weeks. Manchester has had an unseasonal amount of not rain, or sunshine as it’s sometimes known. We’ve been enjoying/enduring a heatwave and our usually lush green at the top of the road is now a brown.

We’ve been draining our water butts and recycling our bath water to keep the planters looking healthy, but the grass has had to take one for the team. I hope the judges will take the current weather conditions into consideration and not hold our brown lawns against us.

Didsbury in Bloom 2018 - Judging Day

I think despite the challenges, Ford Lane is looking fantastic. It’s a shame the heatwave has taken its toll on the main flower bed on the green; but all of the other planters are beautifully blousy with blooms. I love the Votes for Women bike most of all I think.

Didsbury in Bloom 2018 - Judging Day

All of the Didsbury in Bloom volunteers have worked so hard this year, I take my hat off to them. Thank you for making Didsbury extra beautiful all your round!

The Didsbury in Bloom 2018 team won’t know the results of the judging for a little while yet; but we have high hopes of repeating the success of previous years.

Didsbury in Bloom 2018 - Judging Day

STEM Learning: Growing Egg and Cress Heads

Tasked with coming up with some interesting crafts and things to do with three children during the half term, I thought we’d start our week by making some egg and cress heads. I thought it would be interesting to watch them grow over the week. They’re easy to put together and all three had great fun making them and watching them grow over the week.

This activity is perfect for my 7 year old who is in Year 2. Cress grows incredibly quickly, and almost before your eyes. This fast growing crop was really exciting for the children to watch growing. Each day they found a new thing to be excited about. The best day was when they got to try eating the peppery cress, it’s a rare sight watching three children delightedly eating their greens!

STEM Learning: Growing Egg and Cress Heads

Growing egg and cress heads is a great opportunity for children to talk about their observations about how the seed grows into a plant and guessing what will happen next. It can also help to promote scientific thinking and helps with linking science to real life experiences.

Growing Egg and Cress Heads

You will need:
A hard boiled egg each
Cotton wool
Cress seeds
Felt tips to decorate your egg

STEM Learning: Growing Egg and Cress Heads

How to make your egg and cress heads:
Hard boil your eggs and get a grown up to carefully take the top off and scoop out the egg inside.

Gently decorate your egg however you want. We drew pictures of cats and dogs on ours, but you could do almost anything.

Fluff up some cotton wool and put it inside the egg. Then pour some water over the cotton wool. Sprinkle some cress seeds on the top of the cotton wool and put on a windowsill in an egg cup.

Check the progress of your seeds every day, sprinkle more water on the seeds every so often. Within a week all of your seeds should have sprouted and your egg head should have a thick crop of cress hair!

STEM Learning: Growing Egg and Cress Heads

If you enjoyed this, you might also enjoy this Jelly Bean STEM Architecture.

STEM Learning: Growing Egg and Cress Heads

Creating a garden wildlife sanctuary project with the kids

We know that kids who are physically active have better physical and mental health, they are happier and lighter. Kids who spend more time outdoors in the garden have better vision, have reduced ADHD symptoms, are less stressed, develop better social skills and don’t have vitamin D deficiencies.

Outdoor activities and exposure to plants and animals is also an opportunity for our children to discover things they are passionate about and good at. You might be raising the next David Attenborough but if you don’t give your child the opportunity to see and interact with the natural world all that potential will be wasted.

Creating a garden wildlife sanctuary project with your kids

Some Alarming Stats;

British children are among the least active in the world, and fitness levels are plummeting.
¾ of our children spend less time in the great outdoors than prisoners.
70% of mothers recall spending time outdoors every day as children, while only 31% of their children do.

As parents we all know there are lots of good reasons why our kids should be outside but we can’t seem to find the time to make sure it happens. Part of the reason is our own hectic lifestyles which leave little time to go outside. It is much easier for us to plonk our kids in front of the TV or a tablet while we use our tablets to get the shopping done, book a holiday and finish that report. We are also terrified for our kids and most of us won’t consider letting them out of our sight in public which reduces their opportunity for outdoor play and prevents them becoming more independent.

Garden Wildlife Sanctuary Project

A great idea to encourage your kids to get outside is to have a family garden project. A vegetable garden is a wonderful idea but it does take a lot of know-how from the parents and a regular time commitment. For most of us this is too big of an ask. A much easier project is to establish a wild garden. The set-up is easy and low cost and very little regular maintenance is needed. If the project captures your families’ imagination you can develop it as much as you like by adding hedgehog homes, bird boxes & feeders, butterfly gardens and ponds. All you really need to get started is a patch of garden, it only needs to be a few meters wide.

Start With Plants

The starting point for your wild garden project is to put in the right plants. If you are going to be encouraging local wildlife you need to make sure you plant species that are native to the UK and provide food in the form of seeds and nectar bearing flowers as well as thick plants for cover. Sound hard? Not at all just buy a seed mix or two from a specialist supplier online! Look for ‘environmental seeds’ or ‘stewardship seed mixes’. You will also find ‘bee friendly’ mixes which are high in nectar producing flowers. ‘Bird mixes’ or ‘cover crop’ seeds are likely to provide taller and thicker plants to provide somewhere for birds to hide. You can start your kids off on the project by asking them to look online for suitable mixes.

It’s probably a good idea to buy a couple of different mixes for good variety. You can share the seeds between several families because one tin of 250g for £20 can cover as much as 50m of garden. When you plant depends on the seed mix so just read the instructions carefully before you buy. It’s no good buying a seed mix that has to be planted in the spring if you want to get your project started in the Autumn. All you need to do is dig the patch of soil, pull out the weeds and then sprinkle on your seeds. Make sure you water them every three days if there is a dry spell. A better idea is to give the job to the kids who can take it in turns to do the watering.

At the back of your wild patch put in 1 or 2 shrubs/trees. They provide shelter and nesting sites. Choose something that produces berries, they look great and provide Winter food for birds – Rowan, Elderberry, Holly and Crab Apple are all good choices.

Creating a garden wildlife sanctuary project with your kids

Other things to include

Litter – I don’t mean crisp packets – we are talking twigs and dead leaves. Decomposing vegetation is vital for lots of insects who provide food for larger animals like hedgehogs. Just collect up this garden rubbish from the rest of your plot and sprinkle it on your wild garden. Don’t do this if you have just planted seeds as the litter will block the sunlight from reaching the seeds and they will not germinate.

Water – fresh clean water is important. You can simply sink a plant pot or plastic bottle (with the top cut off) into the ground. The kids can take it in turns to top up or replace the water.

Maintenance

Very little! If your plants are a bit thin sprinkle some more seeds down in the spring or Autumn. Usually these wild mixes self-seed so you could find this is not necessary every year. In early spring you might need to trim away the dead dry grass from the previous year to allow the sunlight to reach the soil.

Development

Once your seed mixes are working well you can think about adding a couple of specific plants. Snowdrops and daffodils don’t do much for wildlife but they are some of the first plants and flowers to appear in the Spring so they can be important for keeping the kids interest high. They also grow from bulbs which fascinate kids.

Sunflowers are fantastic for birds, butterflies and bees and you can have a who can grow the tallest competition. Pumpkins or other squash are also easy to grow and great fun. For both sunflowers and squash start the seeds off indoors in a windowsill and then plant them out when they are a about 20 cm tall. You can label them so every family member knows who’s is who’s!

Once the plants are in place you can think about adding some specific homes for birds and animals. You can buy bird nesting boxes and feeders, homes for bees and hedgehogs online. If you are all loving your garden you can consider a bigger addition like a pond.

Education

The wild garden offers a fantastic opportunity for you to educate your kids about plants and animals. You can also give them some fun projects and treasure hunts which will keep them occupied while you do other things. There are loads of treasure hunt style lists online and wildlife spotter lists. These work well in your wild garden but you can also use them to make walks and day trips more interesting. The Woodland Trust has a nice set too.

Of course, you can just come up with a DIY activity for kids if you need to get them out from under your feet. Just ask them the following. They can take pictures of what they find on their phones and then use the computer to identify them.

How many plants can you identify
How many different yellow flowers are there
Find 5 different grass seeds
Look for 6 different sorts of insects
Find 10 different types of leaves
Identify 5 different birds

Creating a garden wildlife sanctuary project with your kids

This is a guest post.

Plants With a Purpose: Using Gardening to Help Wildlife

A thriving garden with loads of activity can do more than just be lovely to look at. Who wouldn’t like to greet the regular hedgehog family before heading off to work, right? The vegetation you keep in your backyard will determine what kind of animals it attracts – and it can even function as a natural pest control.

A post shared by HodgePodgeDays (@hodgepodgedays) on Aug 14, 2017 at 5:42am PDT

By understanding the dynamics behind it all, you’ll not only be on the frontline of saving British wildlife – but you’ll also have a garden in full bloom, beaming with life and activity. And, contrary to what they say, a wildlife garden doesn’t have to be messy at all.

Saving the bees

Sure, hedgehogs and squirrels are cute and all, but they’re not the only ones who’d like a helping hand from time to time. Bees are on a rapid decline in the UK, and nobody seems to be able to pinpoint exactly why – all we can do is to try and make it better for them.

It’s more benefits to attract bees to your garden than simply saving the ecosystem, although this certainly should be reason enough; those fruit trees in your garden will need the help of bees to pollinate the crops.

As much as 35 % of our diet depends on bees pollinating our fruit and vegetable crops, so you better get started and plant those blackcurrant bushes and apple trees as soon as spring arrives.

Gardening for butterflies

So, butterflies have suffered enough already, don’t you think? If you thought your holidays were grey and mundane, think again; the bees and butterflies of Britain have not had a good summer since 2006.

With 58 species of native butterflies in Britain, many of which are at the risk of becoming extinct, you have a lot of opportunities for making your garden their sanctuary. The latest figures show that our work has paid off as well, by the way, as the butterflies that are most threatened have climbed slightly in number due to conservation efforts.

The weather is unsteady, giving us torrents of rain at one point and freezing days the week after, making it super hard for our beloved summer creatures to thrive. Have a read on this depressing article, for example, and find the motivation to plant some forget-me-nots and hawthorns in the spring.

You can even rush to the garden center as soon as you’re done reading this, and plant some ivy as well as sunflowers as they’ll attract everything from bees, birds, and butterflies even in late summer or autumn. There is more wildlife at risk than these two, though, so enlighten yourself with this article and go spread the word.

While we’re stuck inside complaining about the weather, the ecosystem in your backyard is working hard to survive. You can lend them a helping hand at any time of the year, and remember that the work you put in this autumn and winter will make it even easier for them to thrive and survive when spring returns.

This is a contributed post.

Three risks every kitchen gardener needs to know

Once you get into growing your own food in your own garden, it can become something of an addiction. It saves you a lot of money on ingredients in meals or on simple treats like blueberries. When you grow your own food, something about it just tastes better, too. Knowing that you put the work in producing the food on your own plate is honestly more fulfilling than many expect to be, initially. But there are risks to growing your food at home that can result in all your efforts being for naught. Before you deal with the frustration of your hard work going down the drain, here are three risks, in particular, to watch out for.

Three risks every kitchen gardener needs to know

Get rid of the nibblers

Inviting some nature into the garden, whether it’s bringing in butterflies or making room with a hedgehog hut, can make the garden not only a much more relaxing and pleasant place to be. It can make it environmentally friendly, too. But if you let nature run wild, you can be certain your homegrown foodstuffs won’t last very long thanks to the pests. However, pesticides can often have a negative effect on the food you’re growing, too. Get to know which pests are likely to eat the foods you plant and find the companion plants that get rid of them. For instance, aphids are a very common concern when growing tomatoes. Aphids are repelled by catnip. Learn the pests that prove a risk to whatever you’re growing and the companion plants or predators you can introduce in the garden to keep them at bay.

Prepare for a cold snap

Planting foodstuffs is a seasonal job, and you’re best off planting when things are in-season. There’s plenty you can plant in the autumn and winter but, even then, a particularly cold snap can utterly ruin your chances of ending up with healthy vegetables. Controlling your climate with tools like Swallow greenhouses gives you some security that all your hard work won’t go down the drain because of one week’s bad weather. A little climate control allows you to have a greater variety of fresh vegetables the whole year round, too.

Keep the food healthy

Your vegetables might grow to a ripe old state no problem, but another issue is whether they’re really safe to eat or not. In urban gardening, in particular, there are risks that might make it less than trustworthy on the plate. As Treehugger suggests, there are real risks to contamination, whether it’s from the soil or the products you use on it. To minimize that risk, it’s a good idea to test the soil you want to use or even buy fresh, tested soil to create new plots. If you live by a road and you’re concerned about contaminated dust being blown in from the traffic, you can build a wall around the vegetable gardens to serve as a barrier against them, too.

Get over the three hurdles above and making your own berries and vegetables in the garden is going to be no issue at all. Now get out there and start growing.

This is a contributed post.

Blooming beautiful – Didsbury in Bloom 2017

Didsbury village always puts on a fine display for Didsbury in Bloom judging day. We have a small army of volunteers who plant up tubs and flowerbeds throughout the village all over the year, but as judging day for Didsbury in Bloom 2017 approached, more volunteers and residents rolled up their sleeves to make sure Didsbury showed off how blooming beautiful she is.