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Frog Blog...

April 2011

Standing in a client's cherry orchard on the first of April, the sound of hundreds of bumblebees in the blossom overhead was so loud, it is like an engine.
Yes, spring really is here, and those fat furry friends, the bumblebees are out and about, polinating flowers, and making sure your trees give fruit during the summer. With honey bees becoming rarer, it's worth remembering how important bumblebees are, if you have fruit trees in your garden.
In April the breeding season is in full swing for garden creatures.
Frogspawn (eggs) is already hatching, and the little black tadpoles will soon be swimming about. Ponds with plenty of frogs tend to go a bit green at this time, because the jelly of the frogspawn, left after the tadpoles have hatched, breaks down in the water into a nutrient - rich soup, encouraging the growth of free swimming single celled algae, or plant plankton, causing "green water". Don't be tempted to use water cleaning chemicals to deal with this totally natural phenomenon. It clears of its own accord quite quickly, as the tiny animals, the zooplankton, feed on these green morsels, and re-establish a balance.
If you want to speed up the cleaning process, you can buy from most pet shops (and any garden centre with a fish department) little bags of live daphnia, which are minute crustaceans (related to shrimps), which eat the plant plankton. It's easy to tell if they are still alive when you buy them, because you can see them hopping about in the water, which gives them their common name of "water fleas". Buy a few bags (they're usually about £1 per bag), and quickly take them home (they don't stay alive for long in the bag) and empty the bags straight into your pond. In a few days you'll start to see the difference. Of course, fish love to eat these little bite - sized animals, so if you have fish in your pond, you'll have to add more daphnia every few days to keep up the numbers. If you have no fish (which is great for a wildlife pond), the daphnia will multiply by themselves.

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Archive...

February 2012
December 2011/January 2012
November 2011
October 2011
September 2011
August 2011
July 2011
June 2011
May 2011
April 2011
March 2011
Small Birds vs Bigger Bird
Fruit and Veg
Obsessive Tidiness
Irrigation
Foxes and Pets
Knotweed Control
Tree Surgery Advise
Horse Chestnut
Mycorrhizal Root Treatment
Water Conservation
The Vine Weevil
Water - The Garden Lifeblood
Climate Change & Bug Life
Busy Lizzie