I won’t be cutting my grass for the next few weeks.
Have you heard of No Mow May? I heard about it for the first time last year, but unfortunately I only heard about it on 29th May. Shame.
I vowed to do better this year!
The idea is that you don’t cut your grass in May. This gives all the flowers (let’s not call them weeds) in your lawn time to flower, thus providing much-needed nectar for the bees.
It’s such a simple thing to do – in fact, it’s less work than normal!! I like that. I really do.
I’m looking forward to it – I know my lawn will be full of daisies, dandelions and buttercups and I’m looking forward to seeing what else comes up when I give it half a chance.
It’s got me thinking about dandelions in particular. Why do we find them so offensive? Take a good look at one. Seriously, if you had to go to a garden centre to buy one, you would think it was a pretty little plant. And there it is, growing wild and free, not costing a penny and bringing brightness and a bit of fun (remember dandelion clocks when you were a kid?) to our gardens for absolutely no effort on our part. And bees happen to be quite fond of them too. What’s not to love?
I get very few birds in my garden. This is an improvement – I used to get no birds at all.
I’ve deliberately set out to encourage the insect population in the hope that it will attract the birds – I don’t know if it’s because of this, or because of lockdown, but over the last few weeks I’ve been lucky enough to see a few birds out there. A pair of goldcrests passed through – so exciting!! A pair of blackbirds were feeding young in a tree across the road and came back and forth for a while – I think the young must have fledged as I haven’t seen them for a day or two. A coal tit dropped by.
So No Mow May will help in my master plan of encouraging the birds by encouraging the insects – and it will help the bees. Lord knows the bees need all the help they can get!
Many many thanks to everyone who has agreed to write a guest blog for me. They’ll start appearing over the next few days, so watch out for them. If you’re reading this and thinking ‘she doesn’t mean me’ – you’d be wrong. So get scribbling – what’s your Life under Lockdown like? Tell us the highs and lows, the problems and the funny stories. Instructions for what you need to do are here.
We need to hear each other more now than ever.
Stay safe. Stay sane. It’s not forever. We can do this.
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