Kitchen Garden Forum

Sorry to come back on the butterflies, but today has been most amazing: loads of painted ladies, peacock, small tortoiseshell, red admiral, comma, holly blue, ringlet, white-letter hairstreak, dark green fritillary, hummingbird hawkmoth, silver-y .... (and of course the usual whites!). Our garden is almost designed to attract them with several buddleia bushes, teasels, field scabious, knapweed , sunflowers, perennial wallflowers, verbena bonariensis, red valerian and others, but it's several years since we have seen such a butterfly bonanza.
I hope they all breed well and we might get another brood of some of them this year.

You're very lucky Monika, I have seen very few this year & no where near the variety you have. I am happy with my bee numbers this year, pretty late to join the party but catching up & the globe artichoke flowers can have 6 or more on them. The wasps were not invited to the party but there are significant numbers of them as well.

Lots here too but not Monika's variety. Keep being tempted to write to that half-wit who keeps saying you must plant natives to save the insects, I think he must have an interest in the lot that sell native seed mixes. You only have to walk round a garden to see how wrong he is. Monika quotes quite a few. One of the most popular with us today was veronicastrum fascination but fuchsias, any North American daisy, petunias, cosmos, tagetes, single dahlias and many more even the bottle bush that is so unlike anything native.

I'veseen a few varieties here but disappointingly in past couple of weeks I seem to have seen little but a plague of cabbage whites which to be honest are the last things I want to see in the garden!

I've only seen cabbage whites in the garden this year in spite of planting lots of butterfly loving flowers. Mint moths are decimating my various mint plants, all except for the strawberry mint.