Karen Green

WILDLIFE PICTURES

wow - I love it! stag beetle?. Isn't he just amazing.

WILDLIFE PICTURES

brilliat slug pics, I love em

WILDLIFE PICTURES

the jungle next door sounds greaat for wildlife (as long as it hasn't got rubbish/litter in it of course), you too could have plenty of wildlife in your garden if you plant native plants or wildlife friendly plants in your pots, put out a small pond (upturned dustbin lid even), put up a nestbox and some bee homes (all cheap and easy to make yourself). Give it some time then you could take some great pics for this sight - good luck

WILDLIFE PICTURES

love the bee pics, wonder what they are doing -would love to know. Checked in a book, they look like they may beTree bumblebees, Bombus hypnorum. Book says they are newcomers,first recorded in Britain 2001, now fairly widespread in S England. They nest in tree holes - maybe they have mistaken your concrete blocks for trees!

Slugs

I love slugs and recently went searching for them with a group of children, we had great fun slug racing!, we also did some experimenting  as scientist suggested slugs don't like coffee grounds)and found that the slugs appeared quite happy on the coffee grounds ( but I do tend to think they might have been less happy than we could tell, not really sure but they could have crawled off to die later! However, the slugs DID ignore the tea leaves that we surrounded them with, they wouldn't go near them at all, so maybe surrounding your plants with tea leaves might be a good idea - you never know!

Happy to report all the children are now slug lovers too - education  - you can't beat it!

wildflowers

oregano would be nice - you could use it too. Lavender and Rosemary would live well in pots aswell

Butterflies

I don't get it whenever people say they love butterflies then they destroy caterpillars, it perplexes me. If you don't want caterpillars on your cabbages grow other brassicas for them to eat instead - that way you get both butterflies and cabbages. At the very least if you feed the caterpillars etc to the birds you are  helping the birds. Hope Kitty4 can photograph  (to scale maybe) her caterpillars, and hope she finds loads more than 3

Mowing the lawn, but not the frogs!

We had frogs in our lawn when the grass was long - then we bought a lawn mower. mowing through frogs is the most awful experience. I just had to stop doing it, and now leave my husband to mow the lawn!, but - I always rake before him and catch what frogs we find in a pot. I keep them in the pot till the mower is put away, then release them in longer grass. BUT most importantly - we now only mow the tiniest bit of lawn and leave the rest for the frogs and butterflies, it doesn't look untidy when you mow an edge to it. Our frog population is just beginning to recover, but only just, and it still makes me sad the damage that we did in order to conform with the idea of a lawn

WILDLIFE PICTURES

Fantastic pics, would love to see loads more

"Grass Fashion"

Sounds great, but I was thinking more along the lines of allowing the grass to grow naturally, that way there will be more of a meadow effect and it would be bettter for wildlife. At ground level it looks great because it becomes more alive with butterflies and other insects.

"Grass Fashion"