Gardening
My Keswick garden meadow has been benefitting from no-mow May, rewarding with flowers. Now it’s time to make paths to be able to look after the apple and damson trees. Of course there’s been rain but also the long run of sunny days, with the day length now approaching its maximum as the solstice draws closer.
It’s a good year for flowers on the citrus trees I grow in pots on my patio in West London, maybe the best since the lockdown year, 2020. The lemon harvest looks promising, especially now seeing the pretty flowers being grazed and pollinated by Red Mason Bees (Osmia bicornis), attracted by the scent. It’s a while since I introduced a colony of bees to my garden and although they no longer use the nest I provided, I’m very happy to see that their descendants have reappeared this year after hibernation. Red Mason Bees do not have a sting and are not only harmless but very welcome: I specifically don’t use weed-killers or insecticides in my garden so as not to endanger them.
Photography in my patio garden with a manual lens used by my Father for his research zoology work, a Micro-Nikkor 55mm f3.5.
Nice lemons growing on my patio in West London, a reminder of Mediterranean lemons in Menton. Lemons are not the only fruit, there are a few mandarins ripening but my lime tree is disappointing this year. Anyhow, some tidying up and up-potting in the warm spring sunshine, that’s a Rosemary and an Oleander.
A few flowers in my cactus garden on my balcony in Marseille; this plant works in fives (five main flowers, ten off-shoots). But the aromatics (lavender, thyme and rosemary) have again failed. These plants survive in abundance in the harsh conditions on the calcaire mountainsides of Provence so I’m disappointed that specimens from nurseries can’t take the more reasonable conditions I’ve offered them.
Plenty of growth on my balcony cactus garden in Marseille since last year’s up-potting. That means weeds too, the most effective control is weeding by hand, but it’s dangerous...
