#30DaysWild no 28 Ian has been trimming the ivy cladding on the Otter Cottage.
We last trimmed this living wall on 17th June 2020, and it has lasted until now. We like the ivy at Wheatland Farm in general – the bees love ivy flowers when there’s not much else available. And it helps keep buildings warm as it thickens up. It’s also the place where we sometimes see a Holly Blue butterfly. And it’s home to loads of sparrows, and hosted a robin’s nest earlier this spring.
So we let ivy grow, and just give it an annual hair cut. It’s important to keep ivy out of the roof space and away from the barge boards. But that’s about it. Here are this year’s pictures.
Previously for #30DaysWild
This time last year: we were reassessing the Wheatland Farm mini ponds. Well, they’re still providing a similar habitat. And earlier in the year we planted out a few more phragmites in the corner pond of the lodge field, where we’d like to get a decent reed bed going. We took them from reed we pulled from the wildlife pond and which had a few roots on it already. It’s a slow process, but we think we’ll get there.
This time in 2019 – We were again checking up on the mini ponds. Maybe next year we’ll come back to this and monitor progress. Or maybe we’ll be able to report progress on even bigger pond projects that we have in mind.
This time in 2018: A butterfly catch up…. In 2020, like 2021, we’d not yet seen small copper or the pretty gatekeeper butterflies. But they showed up eventually, and they will this year too.
This time in 2017: It was a rainy day, with drops glistening on spiders webs. There’s always a silver lining!