Sunday at Bill's Mother's: 5th Jan 2025
Winter gardening edition. New year pond making the easy way. Why old logs are better than bug hotels. And NASA ❤️ Chesterfield starscapes.
Morning, and a a quick update to the early edition: it looks like the Winter RSR run is officially cancelled for today. I gather organisers are understandably emotional about this late safety decision after all their hard work, and will update everyone with future plans when they can. At present they’re out in the snow trying to sort things out.
I started writing this post before the snow started falling, but it may be that Sunday now looks a bit like the above.
We all know the weather is weird nowadays, but a proper winter of some kind has benefits for wildlife, as it helps many seeds germinate and can prevent diseases for insects and plants.
Despite the cold snap, we have our latest wildlife gardening for the lazy feature today. Given the weather, you may just like to read and make notes for now, and wait for a milder day a bit later this month before joining the wildlife in your patch for a few hours, to prepare for a buzzing and frog hopping spring.
And by way of celestial contrast, we have some more of the wonderful starscapes of reader Martin Bradley, along with the long-awaited Secret Seating 10 challenge for our curious bench seekers.
Thanks to our 275+ paying subscribers, we’re now able to plan ahead a little more, so coming to you this week, all being well, is our January What’s On Out There listings, links and heads up service, along with a special feature for full members following the news you may have seen last week about the discovery of a trail of dinosaur footprints in Oxfordshire.
Over twenty years ago, I met some Sheffield scientists pioneering this field of time travelling research in Yorkshire, and I hope you might like to hear their story too. (As usual, the full story is for full subscribers, with a brief preview for free triallists).
Sign up for a free trail, or upgrade to full membership for £4 a month, which is significantly less than a discounted Nigel Farage Christmas tree bauble.
Wild Water
You can spend weeks reading up about wildlife gardening, or watching video guides. But take a look at some of the places where wildlife has taken over former industrial sites, and you’ll see the enterprise and enthusiasm of our plants and insects. Quite often they just need a bit of help, and as many ecologists say, not doing things is often more important then working hours on end on garden tasks that your local frogs and insects don’t appreciate. Mowing the lawn every week, for example.
As mentioned a few weeks ago, local wildlife gardener and ecologist Angus Hunter takes pride in his burgeoning biodiverse garden, but says if you know what you’re doing, gardening for wildlife leaves you far more time to enjoy your backyard nature reserve.
Wildlife gardening need not be back breaking, so as you sit in your deckchair listening to the bees hum and watching the moths and butterflies, you can perhaps reflect on a job well done more than a neighbour toiling every Sunday to pull up the weeds and shear their hedges and lawns.
Sheffield gardens were the source of a groundbreaking study by Sheffield University a few years ago, which woke many national policy makers up to the value of urban gardens for biodiversity. The report concluded that small private gardens make up about 25% of a typical UK city, and contain far more biodiversity than previously thought. Primarily, insects and other invertebrates, often many thousands of species.
Angus says you don’t need to do that much to bring your garden to life: obviously avoid pesticides, insecticides and the like, plant and encourage native species as much as possible, and relax a little about what some might call untidiness.
I’ll be coming back to him for tips throughout the year to help you learn to love a lazy wildlife garden. Today’s advice is about two winter tasks that should transform your land to a wildlife refuge (although you might want to wait for the snow to clear first).
Ponds: Dig A Hole
If you haven’t got a garden pond yet, the advice is simple: dig a hole. Much of Sheffield is clay which will hold a pond without any help from you. To test your soil, dig a trial hole and see what happens after it rains. If your soil is a bit sandy, you might need to buy some basic pond liner to help, Angus says, but avoid moulded pond liners as they’re designed for ornamental plants rather than frogs and wildlife.
Aim for a minimum of 1-2 cubic metres of water, he suggests, which might mean a pond 2 metres long, 1-2 metres wide and 500mm deep. Keep the sides at a shallow angle so wildlife can easily get in and out, and make sure you have plenty of native plants at the pond sides as those edge habitats will be popular with your new garden residents. You might consider a bit of coir matting around the side to hold things together.
Angus says those shallow margins of your new pond are by far the most important for getting your local wildlife thriving together, so keep that area as big as you can, and very shallow leading up to the banks.
Try to place your pond in the sun, and maybe include a rock or two in the water for birds to rest and drink, and put some sharp sand at the bottom so plants can easily take root.
Buy native water plants from a registered and reputable dealer: don’t transport plants from the wild or from a mate’s pond across the city, as moving pond wildlife can also move diseases that can wipe out frog and toad populations. Some species you might try are: Water Starwort, Watercress, Curly and Broad Leaf Pondweed, Water Mint, Water Forget Me Not, Brooklime and Yellow Flag Iris.
In the spring, don’t panic about algal bloom, says Angus: it provides food for tadpoles and water fleas, which in turn feed other wildlife. It should usually clear.
It might take a year or two for your pond to really burst into life, but meanwhile it will provide water for birds and will soon bring in amphibians and many water insects.
Ponds: Easy Maintenance
As mentioned a few weeks ago, all you really need to do to keep your new pond thriving is clear out some of the plants every winter. Angus says rake or take out about three quarters of the native plants in your pond every year on a winter’s day when the temperature is about 5 degrees centigrade or above, and leave them on the bank to dry out, so any wildlife living in them can crawl back down into the pond.
Compost the fallen leaves or plants after they’ve been on the bank for a day or two, or stick them on your hibernaculum (see below). That’s it.
Logpile Or Hotel?
Call it a log pile or a hibernaculum, or a five star bug hotel. A home-made winter residence for insects and wildlife is best constructed from local materials, and will do a much better job than a hand painted ‘bug hotel’ from a gift shop.
Start with some logs or branches in a shallow trench, then build up more twigs and branches, and maybe some upturned turf here and there, as you tweak your garden over the year. Native plants will grow through the new environment creating new habitats and pockets of air and soil until your log pile becomes a thriving city of bugs, worms and hopefully hibernating amphibians and maybe even hedgehogs.
Build it next to your pond if you can, and it will become a home for your cleared pond plants every winter, as well as your appreciative frogs.
Star of the Month
If you’re sheltering from the elements today, here are few more stunning night sky photos from astrophotographer Martin Bradley, including an amazing picture that NASA, no less, singled out as their photo of the day a couple of years ago. (All photos by Martin Bradley, with Martin’s comments below.)
Squid & Flying Bat - This was a humdinger to capture, it was the faintest thing I have ever imaged, says Martin. The Flying Bat (in red above) is a nebula around 2,000 light years away, and by careful use of filters, long exposure photos and software, Martin has captured the red hydrogen gas of the Flying Bat, along with the much fainter blueish ionised oxygen gas of the Squid, a nebula only discovered 14 years ago.
Aurora & Comet Neowise - Comets travel in huge orbits around our sun reappearing every so often, and are a big imaging challenge because they can move across the sky relatively quickly. When you track the comet the stars become streaked, but if you track the background stars, the comet is a blur. Fortunately you can use fancy software to sort out the mess.
The aurora picture is from this year, on Beeley Moor above Chesterfield. I have an aurora warning app, but as I drove up there didn't seem to be much going on. I took a photo on my way up which showed the green clearly, and by the time I was on the moor properly, the sky was full of greens and red. It was quite surreal and a fantastic experience.
The surface of the Sun is continually letting off gas from its surface, in ‘solar flares’ that don't normally reach the earth. But this year it’s been particularly active, with huge quantities of highly energetic gas heading our way. When the gas reaches the Earth’s upper atmosphere the flares illuminate the same way as a neon light. Green is the usual colour, but to be able to see the purple hues at our latitude is exceptionally rare.
Medusa Nebula - So named perhaps because its filaments give the appearance of the medusa jellyfish, or maybe it is named after the very unpleasant creature of Greek legend? It was discovered in the mid 1950s and is actually a medium sized dying star collapsing in on itself. As it does so huge amounts of different gases are released and are subjected to ionised radiation, making them glow. This is a very dim nebula and required around 30 hours of exposure time using five minute "sub exposures".
I regularly visit Nasa's ‘Astronomy Picture of the Day’ to look at the wonderful images from Hubble, the James Webb telescope and large land based observatories. Occasionally an amateur image is selected, so I was delighted when this picture was chosen as the NASA Picture of the Day, March 17th 2023.
Fabrick Rock - Near Ashover in Derbyshire. People have often asked me if I feel vulnerable out in remote places at night with a load of expensive camera gear. I have never had an anxious moment but have had some marvellous encounters with some pot smoking local youth here at Fabrick Rock.
All photos by Martin Bradley of Chesterfield Astronomical Society
What’s On Out There (from Sunday 5th January)
A tiny selection from our new (and regularly updated) What’s On Out There news and listings post for December. (Full post for full subscribers only).
Sun 5th - Winter Round Sheffield Run - full, but watch them fall over in the mud / snow.
Sun 5th - Wadsley Wassail - cider throwing and carol singing
Mon 6th - SRWT Volunteer Session - Crabtree Ponds
Mon 6th - Fri 10th - Daily health walks in parks and green spaces from Step Out Sheffield, 10 am start
Weds 8th - RSPB local group walk - Beauchief
Thurs 9th - Friends of Porter Valley work morning
Fri 10th - Moonriver Night Fell Race (Dovedale - £10/12)
Sat 11th - Parkwood Springs conservation volunteering
Secret Seating (10)
We felt you might appreciate a sunny secret seat today. As you can see, there are enough mystery benches for a large family here, but where are they?
Andy Buck was closest for Secret Seat 9, but his location was a tad vague, Parkwood Springs being quite a large place, so only a silver virtual medal for his efforts, so far. As usual, let’s have your guesses in the comments below, and if you have any great secret seat photos yourself, do send them in to bbobillsmothers@gmail.com.
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... and you've sorted that already on the web. We dug a pond about a metre deep at our old house and it stayed too cold for tadpoles to grow up.
Also loving the wild gardening guides. One small thing though - it's late and I'm tired but I think 500cm is 5 metres, which would be a very deep garden pond?