🐦🐦🐦 Three Pigeons Post week ending 12 July 2020: The Icemen (and the flying ants) Cometh

Monday 6 July. Anita. 'What a sow and sow' A watering session to keep the new plants that went in yesterday happy. Plus sowing a couple of packets of seeds: *White Cosmos * Purple cone flower (Echinacea purpurea) These were intended for my own garden but they are far better suited to the sunny aspect of The Three Pigeons. Both are good plants for pollinators.

Monday 6 July. Harry. 'Stakeout'. The 'rump stake' shot is nobody’s best angle (perhaps) but got the job done recycling white, steel-tipped trampoline netting rods as markers for the half-dozen Japanese Maples planted in the Group Activity last weekend, ground pre-softened by Anita’s application of the Thames earlier in the day.

Tuesday 7 July. Anita. 'Hello Duckies'. Another watering session to keep the new plants and seeds happy. Lovely to see a family of six ducks as I was collecting water: are these the ducklings that we saw back in early May, all grown up?

Weds 8 July. Salwah & JP 'ANT we lucky it didn't rain? WEED have BEEn soaked!!' On an unsettled, wet Wednesday evening, JP and Salwa made their way to the 3 Pigeons plot to get into the weeds and clear up round the edges. After pulling out a few piles of the pesky plants, and disturbing an awful lot of ants in the process, they each headed off to their next GG mission!

Sunday 12 July. Harry & Anita. 'The Icemen Cometh'. First an embarrassing omission. This should have been a small group mission but Anita forgot to list it. And she forgot to bring the key to the Buccleuch Gardens lock-up so a trip home was required. Harry and Anita spent three hours, socially distanced by about 250m, with Harry painting the final pallet and undercoating the metal chair in the Buccleuch lock-up and Anita working at the Three Pigeons, moving various low-growing plants from the centre and planting: * 3 Acer Palmatum Dissectum Filigree * 2 Dwarf weeping willow ( grafted) * 12 sempervivum houseleeks.

And the pun? The Ice Men Cometh? On a super sunny Sunday, there were two offers of ice: the first came with a cooling gift of ice cubes from the driver of an ice delivery van; the second was from the Josef ice cream van who has been parked adjacent to the 🐦🐦🐦 for the past 2 weeks.

Lots of passers by complimenting our work, including a walking group from the Richmond Society with Nicky and Linda who were part of the original RicSoc team who started the transformation of the plot. Jane and Jon from GoodGym Richmond also stopped on their way past for a chat.

And the ants. Salwah and JP had seen them massing on Wednesday. Sunday 12 July proved to be ‘Flying Ant Day’ in Richmond. All the Black Garden Ants 🐜 we’ve been seeing over the past few weeks finally had their day of glory, sprouting wings ready for a mass take-off to enable new queens to mate with males from different colonies, and set up new nests of their own.