Thyme to bee wild

Firstly, a big welcome to Roberta, who joined us for her first community mission on this pleasant May morning in Kidwells Park. It was also lovely to catch up with Rekha and Kelly and to meet our task owners, Rachel and Deborah from Wild Maidenhead, for the first time.

This morning's task was to add more wildflowers to a 'nectar bar' that Wild Maidenhead started at Kidwells last year as part of a project to make our local parks more biodiverse and more friendly to vital pollinators like bees.

Today we were planting little plugs including primrose, cowslip and thyme and sowing seeds including clover and vipers bugloss. The varieties were chosen not only to attract and sustain flying pollinators but also to encourage butterfly larvae, otherwise known as caterpillars! They should also provide more colour and interest year round than the varieties sown last year can on their own. You can see the full range of plants in Deborah's written plan in the photos.

As well as masterminding the planting plan, Deborah was super organised when it came to setting up the task. She laid everything out so that we could work at our own socially distanced planting stations and her instructions were very clear so that by the end even the less confident gardeners among us could feel satisfied that we had done a good job.

We were quite late in the season to be doing this planting (there was a delay in the delivery of the plants) so some of these little beauties might need a bit more luck than normal to thrive, but we are optimistic that return visits to Kidwells in the coming months will yield rewarding splashes of colour and the friendly buzzing of more tiny pairs of wings.