The Nature Garden: gardening, wildlife and nature notes · The Weekending Show

Summertime

·39 min·2 clips

Dr Jamie Wildman says the Big Butterfly Count 2024 saw just seven butterflies per 15-minute count.

1. The Nature Garden Podcast episode "Summertime" links mid-July gardening, summer birds, the Big Butterfly Count, and the Love Northumberland Awards. 2. Carl Steinson hosts with Tom Pattinson on garden jobs, Tom Cadwallander on birdlife, Dr Jamie Wildman from Butterfly Conservation, and Steve Lowe from Cresswell Peel Tower. 3. The episode asks what midsummer means for a Northumberland garden, a coastal birdwatcher, and people trying to record butterflies. 4. Tom Pattinson stands in six island raised beds of about five square metres each and names sweet peas, strawberries, broad beans, lettuce, turnips, parsley, sunflowers, onions, courgettes, sweet corn, parsnips, Brussels sprouts, leeks, spinach, runner beans, carrots, potatoes, apples, and roses. 5. He says Spencer sweet peas need watering and regular picking, and he keeps broad bean roots in the ground because nitrogen-fixing bacteria improve the soil. 6. He also warns that courgettes become marrows if they are not picked at 10 to 15 centimetres, and he expects the Swift sweet corn to be ready in the first or second week of August. 7. Tom Cadwallader describes swifts as screeching birds that arrive in late May and leave at the end of July, then compares them with nightjars and grasshopper warblers. 8. He says nightjars live on forest fringes and low timber after Storm Arwen cleared a former conifer site, and he says grasshopper warblers make an almost endless grasshopper-like song from dense undergrowth. 9. He explains that swifts feed on "aerial plankton," nightjars feed on moths, and grasshopper warblers feed on small insects and grubs. 10. He also identifies sandwich, arctic, common, roseate, and little terns at Cocod Island, and says the sandwich tern is the loudest and has a black bill with a yellow tip. 11. The cuckoo segment is brief but specific: Tom says the birds winter in Niger, Ghana, and Sierra Leone, stay only about a month, and use meadow pipits or reed warblers as hosts. 12. Jamie Wildman gives the Big Butterfly Count dates as 18 July to 10 August and says anyone can take part in 15 minutes from a garden, balcony, terrace, park, or country lane. 13. She reports that the 2024 count found just seven butterflies per 15-minute count on average, down from 12 in 2023, and that 81% of species declined. 14. She names common blue, holly blue, green-veined white, small white, small tortoiseshell, painted lady, and Scotch argus among the worst-hit species. 15. She says 935,000 butterflies and day-flying moths were recorded and 9,000 counts logged zero butterflies, then links the fall to habitat loss, pesticide use, and climate breakdown. 16. Steve Lowe says the Love Northumberland Awards are organised by Northumberland County Council and celebrate community and voluntary work across the county. 17. He describes Cresswell Peel Tower winning Best Countryside and Coastal Project and says meeting volunteers left him impressed by how many people were making friends while helping local areas. 18. The style shifts between practical gardening advice, bird-nature explanation, and short interview segments with a community-news tone. 19. Gardeners, birders, and local nature volunteers will get the most from this episode. 20. Listeners wanting tightly edited storytelling without seasonal field notes may skip it.

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