How does your garden grow? - The Bear and Badger

Kow

Some of mine are too. Tomatoes don't seem to care what season it is as long as it's not freezing.

Kow

Chilis on the other hand are pernickety little bastards. Some thrive and others just keel over immediately. Cayenne and peperoncinos don't mind what the weather is. Jolokias immediately commit suicide. Habaneros won't even sprout. Jalapeños have a go at it and then decide nah and fall over.

poprock

Yeah, we’re finding the same. This is our first year doing chilis from seed instead of buying starts and it seems to be pot luck which ones do well and which don’t. Much fussier than peppers.

Kow wrote:

Some of mine are too. Tomatoes don't seem to care what season it is as long as it's not freezing.

Where we live the official last frost date this year isn’t until next week …

hylian_elf

I read on the RHS website that in the first year after planting, young fruit on a young apple tree should be picked off to encourage growth of the tree. Shall I kust pick them off by habd, cut them off etc?

Wookienopants

hylian_elf wrote:

I read on the RHS website that in the first year after planting, young fruit on a young apple tree should be picked off to encourage growth of the tree. Shall I kust pick them off by habd, cut them off etc?

Use your teeth

EvilRedEye

I know nothing about this but from a Google it sounds like you should just pick them unless you can’t get them off because you might damage next year’s buds with a blade or something.

Hodge360

Any recommendations for books/websites for a beginner? Gardeners World and RHS are mostly good but I sometimes feel I have stupid questions about things I'm expected to know.
Tempted by the RHS HOW TO GARDEN WHEN YOU'RE NEW TO GARDENING book. Good place to start?

yourfavouriteuncle

Yeah, I guess so. You can ask stuff here too and I’ll do my best to help.

Hodge360

Cheers. Will definitely ask along the way but I'm wanting to figure out what I want, how to go about it and get an overall feel for timings of different jobs so too big an ask to put in here.

Unlikely

Not sure where best to post this so I have decided here is the best place to post this.

It looks like we have bees nesting in the cavity between the exterior and interior walls of the house. There's a glofbol-sized hole where a pipe used to extrude, and bees are nipping in and out regularly.

I have no problem with bees, but am not sure whether this is something to be concerned about. A cursory search suggests they'll fuck off later in the year and given many of them are endangered I'm happy to let them go about their business as long as they don't bother us. Anyone have any advice?

yourfavouriteuncle

Yeah, leave em. You can’t do anything about bees anyway. Wasps you can get poisoned but bees are the untouchables.

Unlikely

Cheers, was hoping you'd chime in.

yourfavouriteuncle

Hodge360 wrote:

Cheers. Will definitely ask along the way but I'm wanting to figure out what I want, how to go about it and get an overall feel for timings of different jobs so too big an ask to put in here.

Fair enough. The RHS do a beginners guide to gardening book which is pretty good. BBC have various gardeners world books too. Anything with Monty Don on the front should be fairly up to date and the guy seems to be a national treasure to boot.

RHS website is also really really great. They’ll have general guides to gardening right down to specific plants and they have a search function that actually works. Between those three things you should get going.

Wookienopants

yourfavouriteuncle wrote:

Yeah, leave em. You can’t do anything about bees anyway. Wasps you can get poisoned but bees are the untouchables.

Yea, best just leave them be(e).

They'll buzz off eventually. You can then plug the holes when they've gone.

EvilRedEye

I was taught at my Church of England primary school that bees were created by Satan.

Unlikely

Well done, Satan.

yourfavouriteuncle

EvilRedEye wrote:

I was taught at my Church of England primary school that bees were created by Satan.

Ha.

yourfavouriteuncle

I think you get a fairly big fine if you kill/destroy their nests? How this would be discovered I do not know but a pest control man won’t get rid of them.

poprock

I don’t think there is any law protecting bees in the UK. Bats, yes. Bees, no.

If you can find a bee specialist, they tend to like bees though. So they’d move your hive rather than kill them. What they do is find the queen and move her. The rest of the swarm voluntarily follows within a day or two.

Fuck knows how anyone would find the queen if your bees are inside the wall of the house, mind.

yourfavouriteuncle

Nah, we’ve had pest guys out on a couple of jobs and one each at home and the MiLs and they all start with “f it’s bees we can’t do anything”. I doubt you’re going to prison if you fill up the hole but that’s not a chance I’m willing to take.

Unlikely

I'll wait until they move on later this year then fill up the hole.

poprock

Aye, fair enough. I like having bees around anyway.

poprock

According to this, the bees won’t return to the same place next year anyway so you’re grand to just wait and block the hole up.

https://bpca.org.uk/pest-aware/bee-control-how-to-get-rid-of-bees-bpca-a-z-of-pests/189185

Time_on_my_hands

Anyone here try the method of keeping plants watered by making holes in a bottle lid and keeping the bottles upside down in the plant pots?
We're going away for the first time in ages this summer and I don't want to lose the pumpkins.

yourfavouriteuncle

Dunno about that but don’t pumpkins need a lot of water? Might be better asking a friend or neighbour to water them a couple of times a week?

davyK

I'd consider bees in my garden as a privilege. We get quite a few visiting us because they like the lavender we have growing in several spots.

Unlikely

We get plenty of bees in the garden. I just wasn't sure whether them moving in to the house was to be encouraged.

davyK

Erm yeah.....there is that. Can you hear 'em droning? That would be a bit freaky.

Unlikely

Nah, I can just see them mashing their heads off my office window as they try to find the entrance.

Kow

I have cutter bees in my garden. They slice nice round chunks out of leaves, and also rose petals. They can leave some of them looking quite raggedy. They're pretty fascinating though, if you catch them in the act. They're really fast and efficient and they drag the piece off with them to build a nest in a crack, or hole or in our case, the ends of bamboo sticks. They're solitary so they don't have a hive, just a little nook for one. I'm not sure if they even sting or not, but they seem harmless anyway.

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