May - Walk but Don't Mow!

May is National Walking Month! If you already walk a lot, this is the ideal time to get out and about and enjoy the great outdoors in, hopefully, the lovely Spring weather. If you don't walk much, then this is the ideal time to start! You can find out more about the benefits of walking and tips for how to include more walking in your daily routine, then the Living Streets website has lots of ideas! Their main campaign is to try to inspire people to walk for 20 minutes every day during May! 

Today I walked through the Dells alongside the Water of Leith, doing my weekly river patrol.  There are lots of wildflowers in bloom at the moment, including these lovely Red Dead Nettles, Forget-me-nots and Dandelions. 

The Wild Garlic (Ramsons) are starting to bloom

as are the buttercups

bluebells (some native bluebells and some that are hybrids between native and Spanish bluebells)

and a small patch of Greater Stitchwort 

If you have a garden, you might want to consider allowing a small patch to grow wild, you might get flowers like those above appearing amongst the grass! If so, you may be interested in No Mow May! This is a call to leave your lawn to grow throughout the month, allowing flowering plants to flourish in amongst the grasses. A richer variety of flowering plants will support a greater range of insects and other invertebrates, which in turn will support a range of birds and mammals. Trevor Dines (Trevor the Botanist) has an excellent thread on Twitter, about how having areas of both short grass (cut regularly) and long grass (cut once a year in Autumn) in your garden is ideal for wildlife. He also gives tips on how best to manage this.

Tree Following May post

This year for Tree Following, I've chosen the beautiful cooking apple tree in Crafty Green Boyfriend's mother's garden. You can read the post where I introduced the tree here. 

The tree is around fifty years old and produces a lot of apples (last year was a bumper year and I gave apples to colleagues, neighbours, students in my writing classes as well as friends!). The apples are excellent in apple crumble or just stewed and eaten with custard or added to porridge. 

Here are some recent photos of the tree:

The cooking apple tree is the one in the background, in front of the shed. The tree to the right in the photo is an eating apple tree (the garden also contains two plum trees and a pear tree!).

Looking up into the tree

close-ups of the flowers just about to open

It's amazing to see how quickly the buds are opening, here is a photo taken on 20 April:

and the same buds a week later:

 

Lauriston Castle Gardens

 Yesterday, we visited Lauriston Castle in the north west of Edinburgh.

Our main reason for visiting was to view the cherry trees, which were in full bloom in the Kyoto Friendship Garden. This garden was established in 2002 to celebrate the twinning of Kyoto and Edinburgh. 

The flowers are already starting to lose their petals 

In other parts of the castle grounds, the bluebells are almost in full bloom

and the pond has a lot of both Marsh Marigold (on the island) and the invasive Skunk Cabbage (around the edges)

Cherry Blossom in Edinburgh's Meadows

 Cherry trees are in bloom across Edinburgh and The Meadows is one of the best places to see these lovely blossoms. So I took a stroll there first  thing yesterday morning. Here are some of my photos.

it's not just cherry trees either! There's a beautiful crab apple tree

 

a few Norway Maples 

and a couple of Wych Elms (that are resistant to Dutch Elm Disease) including this magnificent old tree

And at home, we have this lovely view from our living room

Stop Food Waste Day

Food waste is one of the topics that we cover in a class I'm currently co-tutoring on nutrition, food journaling and creative writing. We've discussed how reducing food waste can save money during the current cost of living crisis. 

And today is Stop Food Waste Day! 

A shocking one third of food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted globally.

Food waste is central to some of the key challenges facing the world today, not just hunger and poverty, but also climate change, health and wellbeing and agricultural sustainability. Wasting food also wastes the energy used to grow, harvest, process and cook. Food waste in landfill can cause methane emissions, a potent greenhouse gas. 

Stop Food Waste Day aims to inspire individuals and organisations to reduce food waste. The campaign website includes practical, creative ideas to minimise food waste, including a cookbook. This cookbook shares ideas on how to use leftover foods, including items you may have imagined as being impossible to use, such as banana peels!

There are three main types of ways to reduce food waste

Prevent food waste at source. For individuals this means storing food optimally, making use of every edible part of the ingredient and planning meals ahead of time. There are also ways in which agriculture and food production could become more efficient.

 

Inspire others to waste less, and repurpose more

 

Repurpose food by redistributing surplus food to your local community, or giving a second life to ingredients that most commonly go to waste 

 

Any leftover food that can't be reused should be composted where possible - for example in a compost heap in your garden or in a council food composting collection. City of Edinburgh Council has a food waste collection, though I don't think all councils do.

How do you minimise your food waste? Feel free to share ideas in the comments!

Find out more and get involved at the Stop Food Waste website.

Azaleas and Rhododendrons in the Botanics

 We particularly love visiting The Royal Botanic Gardens at this time of year. There's a long season of azaleas and rhododendrons, with different species and varieties coming into bloom at different times during March and April. 

We last visited towards the end of March and saw a wonderful variety of blooms, which you can see in this post. 

We visited again this weekend and here are some of the lovely blooms we saw: 

many of the azalea bushes have lots of lichens growing through them, which look beautiful.

I managed to capture this Buff Tailed Bumblebee on camera 

Even nicer to see was this Hairy Footed Flower Bee, apparently Edinburgh's Botanic Gardens is one of the favourite places for these bees

This Woodpigeon was very curious about us, and circled round us a few times while we were sitting on a bench admiring the azaleas