Members receive a mailed or hand delivered quarterly newsletter with articles from members, reports on meetings and trips as well as general gardening information and tips. Its title is ALLAGOGG.

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Extracts from ALLAGOGG Autumn 2009

VIC’S NATURE NOTES 

So the Met Office long-range forecast of a long hot summer turned out to be wrong and we have just suffered the third wet July in a row. The Met Office have now revised their forecast (on St Swithin’s Day, perhaps?) and expect most of August to be wet as usual. However, the last three days have actually been warm and sunny so perhaps they’ll be wrong again!

In fact the summer started quite well with some warm weather in May and a heat wave at the end of June. There was also plenty of rain, so that growing conditions were excellent. In fact, although July was very wet, it was also quite warm for the most part with some sunny, if windy, days between the wet ones. So conditions don’t appear to have been too bad for wildlife, and certainly judging by activity in our garden our local birds seem to have had a pretty good year for breeding. We now put out sunflower seeds throughout the summer and these have attracted lots of young birds, particularly blue tits and great tits. Also there have been lots of young robins and blackbirds around, and the blackbirds seem to have produced a second brood, as we were watching a juvenile sitting on a garden chair waiting for its parents to feed it. This is always worrying as we hope that one of the local cats won’t spot the young bird before the parent finds it and moves it out of sight; but it is best not to interfere as the parents will be around, and moving the young bird wouldn’t really be helpful. In fact the population of blackbirds in the area, judging by the number of cock birds singing in the early summer, is pretty strong with at least three pairs present. Also a walk around the local streets proves that, despite the presence of so many cats, the population of urban blackbirds is strong.

It has also been a reasonable year for butterflies in the garden, in spite of the poor weather in July, and the buddleia bush has had more butterflies on it over the last few days than for many years. The main butterfly event of the year has been the arrival of vast numbers of painted lady butterflies from North Africa at the end of May. These have bred successfully and now their offspring are present in large numbers in town and country throughout the land. Why this mass migration occurs from time to time (the last major influx was in 1996) is uncertain -- maybe they believed the long-range forecast and came here expecting sunshine! Probably however it reflects good breeding conditions in the Atlas Mountains, resulting in more butterflies than would be supported further south. Whatever the reason, they have made their incredible journey north to colonise the UK. On arrival they lay their eggs on thistles and then die, leaving their offspring to emerge at the end of July. The butterflies cannot survive a British winter at any stage of their life cycle, except perhaps on the south coast, and it is not clear whether the present generation will migrate south back to Africa when the weather turns colder. In addition to the painted ladies, there also seem to be plenty of peacock butterflies, as well as cabbage whites and gatekeepers in the garden this year. The larger butterflies (painted ladies, peacocks and large whites) seem to prefer feeding on the buddleia, whereas the small whites prefer lavender and the gatekeepers prefer marjoram. 

Out in the countryside the common grassland butterflies also seem to have done well, and in particular there were lots of the attractive ringlets around earlier in July. Because the caterpillars of these butterflies feed on native grasses, they often do better after a wet summer than a very dry one, as the grass grows much better providing more food for their young. Thus despite two wet summers prior to this year, numbers of ringlets, small heaths, meadow browns, marbled whites and gatekeepers have held up well, and plenty could be found around whenever the sun decided to shine for a while in July. However, I have had much less success in seeing some of the less widespread species, and, for example, have not seen any chalk hill blues at all this summer. However, on a sunny morning in June, Stella and I did find the only colony of marsh fritillaries in the county on Strawberry Banks, the Glos Wildlife Trust reserve near Oakridge Lynch. As the name suggests, this butterfly frequents marshy ground where its food plant devil’s bit scabious grows, but as this plant can also be found on dry limestone and chalk banks, the butterfly is not confined to damp habitats. It is a pretty butterfly, smaller than the well-known dark-green and silver-washed fritillaries, and was probably once much more widespread through the Cotswolds, since devil’s bit scabious can be found on most old limestone grassland in the Cotswolds. Although this flower is superficially similar to that of the common field scabious, devil’s bit is not closely related. The flower is smaller and a much darker blue, and comes much later in the year, well into September where it often provides nectar for late flying butterflies such as small tortoiseshells.

Thinking about wild flowers, it has been a very good year for wild orchids, as those members who attended the meeting at Cotswold Farm in June will have noted. Thanks to the work of the Cotswold AONB Board, more limestone grassland is being managed properly, resulting in strong colonies of the common species such as early-purple, common-spotted and pyramidal orchids spreading well. Some nature reserves have had spectacular shows of orchids, but in addition the plants may often be found in odd corners in the Cotswolds where land has not been ploughed. The most spectacular display of orchids we found this year was in fact just outside the county in the Clattinger Farm reserve managed by the Wiltshire Wildlife Trust on the Cotswold Water Park. There were some rarer bee orchids at Cotswold Farm and these and other species such as musk orchids can be found around the county. However, some of these species have very unusual life cycles and may not appear at the same times each year. As the summer draws on the colours in the meadows are dominated by the blues and purplish reds of scabious and knapweed which provide a plentiful supply of nectar for butterflies and other insects such as bumblebees. It has been noted in the press that the population of honey bees in the UK has declined seriously, but there seem to have been lots of bumblebees like the white-tailed bumblebee present both in the garden and in the countryside as a whole. Although bumblebees do not provide us with honey it is good that they are out and about pollinating our fruits and vegetables (the runner beans seem very popular this year) in the absence of honeybees.

I read today (10th August) that July was the sixth wettest on record, although not as wet as July 2007, when we had such bad floods in the county. Let us hope that the wettest of the weather is now over and that August and September will give us some sunny days before the onset of autumn and winter.

Vic Ellis

CHERRY’S CUTTINGS September 2009

Organics
The Food Standards Agency has made itself look foolish once again by sponsoring a report which purported to find that organic food has no nutritional advantage over the conventionally produced stuff. The research was commissioned from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), and had examined hundreds of relevant publications going back 50 years, to come up with that surprising conclusion. Needless to say the press rushed to say that we’d all been wasting our money buying organic food. So the Soil Association and other organisations had to bring out their big guns to refute the whole report. Best of these was from The Organic Center (TOC, in America) which picked holes all over the FSA report because it had done this same exercise itself but more rigorously, and had excluded (for example) old reports on the nutritional value of crops which are no longer available. TOC had taken more care to pick strictly comparable examples. They also found organic foods contained more anti-oxidants and phenolics, while many of the non-organic crops were found to contain actual anti-health components, such as excess nitrogen which is hazardous in food. (The LSHTM people had not even looked at those.) In any case, most of us buy/grow organic for the simple reason that it’s not drenched in pesticides and takes much better care of the environment. The cream of all this is that the appendix to the FSA/LSHTM report does detail nutritional advantages in organic food, but that got conveniently left out of the main conclusions! Shame on FSA, on the government which swallowed all that, and on correspondents like Robin McKie in the Observer who not only failed to see the flaws but claimed (imagined) virtues of GM crops. 

The House of Commons committee which scrutinises Defra’s activities has issued a report on food security in the coming decades, bearing in mind climate change, rising populations, reduced oil supplies etc. They examine various ways of increasing home food production, including a couple of paragraphs on the possible use of GM. Organic farming gets two paras as ‘having a role to play’, thought not, seemingly a major one. So, some warm words there, and scads of foody committees, but whether Defra will take proper action remains to be seen. 

Last time I lamented the demise of the monthly Organic Gardening & Home, but luckily Kitchen Garden which took it over is doing a reasonable job in the 34 organic pages it is now adding. Several of the familiar writers have transferred across, including John Walker who has found that a single metaldehyde slug pellet can pollute 10,000 litres of water ‘beyond drinking water quality’ -- sobering thought.

The quarterly magazine Science in Society which has excellent, though often very technical, articles on all kinds of organic/GM matters, contained a good summary of Monty Don’s presidential address to the Soil Association -- see no. 40 of SiS, winter 2008, pp 50--51. The founding spirit of SiS, Dr Mae-Wan Ho, also has an excellent piece on the contribution of organic and local agriculture to mitigating climate change, because of the much-reduced carbon emissions all round (no fertiliser manufacture, fewer miles travelled etc).

The Garden Museum in Lambeth (London) is putting together an exhibition celebrating 100 Years of Grow Your Own and would like to hear from any vegetable growers who have got items that might usefully go in the display -- photos, diaries, newsletters, recipes etc. See This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or phone 020 7401 8865 with brief description and/or photo of items.

Genetic modification
Thank goodness for one journalist who has seen through the shenanigans of Monsanto et al! Catherine Bennett in the Observer for 16 August subjected them to a real hatchet job. She also chided the government for not taking firm control of our food supplies in the face of the biotech publicity machine. She said the GM companies provided, in addition to ‘repulsive treats’, no trustworthy evidence on safety, greatly increased pesticide/herbicide use, not one single drought-resistant plant, etc etc. She was scathing on the GM ‘genuine purple carnation’ which flower arrangers can now camouflage inside arrangements of blueberries, ‘something never done before’ -- we should hope not! Anti-GM campaigners also came in for some of her stick, for instance the rather silly term ‘Frankenstein foods’, and Peter Melchett’s acceptance of a post with a pro-GM PR company (well, perhaps he’s just being a mole? He is still vocal enough in defence of the Soil Association). The food minister Hilary Benn is also chastised for even considering the use of GM (he said ‘there’s no evidence that GM is not safe to eat’) because while the biotech companies remain in total control of the research, he should realise the evidence will never come to light! Ms Bennett finishes up by saying Defra should explain how it would justify putting part of our food policy under the control of a ‘few fantastically aggressive and wholly unaccountable multinationals’ -- who, under the cloak of philanthropy, have funded the production of ‘educational’ (ie pro-GM) materials for school websites. 
The Dept for International Development (DfID) White Paper Eliminating world poverty is still chasing the wild and remote goose of (GM) drought-resistant crops. In answer to that, GMFreeze’s splendid report Blind Alley attacks DfID for promoting intensive farming systems (including GM crops) in Africa and elsewhere, rather than properly encouraging the more sustainable, small-scale systems -- organic growing, integrated pest management and sheer local know-how -- which would safeguard both food supplies and the environment .

More trouble for Defra and the FSA, who have claimed that the continuing EU ‘zero-tolerance’ policy on GM soya and maize will interrupt supplies of animal feed. This is despite higher prices being offered for non-GM feed (Brazil alone is growing more than 21 million tonnes of non-GM soya meal every year, enough for EU demands). GMFreeze says that Defra and FSA assume the worst in suggesting that non-GM supplies will dry up, and are taking no account of either long-term feed security or the low prices farmers are being paid. Also Freeze says that the report does not help consumer choice, because despite massive public support for labels stating ‘GM-fed’ livestock, there is no legislation for that. Farmers would have a unique selling point if they could show that their animals, and the products from them, were GM-free.

More on GM’s inadequacies: $6m dollars were spent on developing a virus-resistant sweet potato which turned out a complete failure. Then a virus-resistant cassava plant was going to boost production tenfold; but between 1995 and 2006 (and some more millions of dollars) the GM varieties lost their resistance, and their DNA changed. Nonetheless the pro-GM-cassava propaganda machine rolls ever onward, of course. Meantime, in Africa, conventional breeding has produced healthy virus-resistant cassava which is being grown throughout the Great Lakes region of central Africa by some 330,000 smallholders.

To keep abreast of developments about GM, try the website www.gmwatch.org, which has at last been restored to health following the 14-month long series of cyber attacks it suffered from sources unknown.
Cherry Lavell ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it )

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A GOOSEBERRY CAKE

10 oz self-raising flour
1 tsp baking powder
½ tsp salt
4 oz caster sugar
4 oz Demerara sugar
4 oz butter
2 large eggs
½ pint unsweetened stewed gooseberries
1 tsp vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 180deg C/Fan 160deg C/Gas 4. Line the base of a 9-inch cake tin with parchment and butter the sides. Melt the butter.

Mix the dry ingredients together and make a well in the centre. Add the butter, eggs, gooseberries and vanilla and beat together well and pour into the tin. Smooth the top and sprinkle with a little extra Demerara. Bake for about 45 mins until firm to the touch and a skewer in the centre comes out clean. Cool for at least 15 mins in the tin before turning out.

Stella Ellis