Great weather to hunt down the minibeasts today! It was not too hot and not too cold.
We started off with sweep nets to see what flying insects we could catch in the long grass. We had a mixture of flying ants, beetles, moths and butterflies.
We then moved on to tapping tree branches and catching the falling insects in a big sheet. Here we caught a lot of crawling insects including spiders, ants and click beetles.
After searching in trees, we looked through some pond water to see what things were living in the water. We caught the animals in jars and had a look at them through magnifying glasses. Here we found pond snails, leeches, dragonfly nymphs, water boatmen, water fleas and water louse.
To top off the day we had a lovely stroll through Teazle Wood (which backs onto the Garden) and dig some digging in the leaf litter and rolled over some logs to see what lived under them. Woodlouse, centipedes, caterpillars and worms were found in Teazle Wood.

It is a fantastic space to use and we are so glad to hear this good news that it will stay in the hands of the people of Leatherhead to use as common land after its purchase by the Friends of Teazle Wood. Congratulations to Lucy Quinnel and her team.

All in all a great day, and we will definately do it again in the summer!

Another great weekend was had by all again and some more new faces came to visit too. Today was all about getting paint everywhere... Our aim was to paint all of our new and old pallets which will hold some troughs. In the end we also painted our tool shed. It looks like new again!

On top of this a flower bed was planted out, more potatoes were harvested, more woodchip added to the strawberries to keep the slugs away, tomato plants were given a helping hand from Pat, Jacque rescued some radishes, Tom did some weeding, Sarah made a lovely cup of tea and Gary stayed in bed... (he has a poorly ankle! Get well soon!)

A small thank you to B&Q Leatherhead who just happend to have 3for2 on all paint today. Made things that little bit cheaper for us!

What a beautiful weekend it's been. A few new faces came down on Saturday which was great to see. Lots more vegetables were planted out in to beds and tyres, including loads of pumpkins which Jen has been tending to.

As you can see from the photos, we had a nice harvest of vegetables including new potatoes, mange tout, red onions and rhubarb. Everyone was able to take some home with them to cook up fresh. You can't get much better than picking them fresh yourself and eating them that day! Some even ate mange tout straight from the plant! Yummy!

After waiting an hour and a half for the keys for the shed we got down to some serious weeding today! With the warm weather the weeds have taken over whole beds and needed removing.
Once that was all done we planted out runner beans, romansco cauilflowers, red brussel sprouts and pumpkins, thinned out the tomatoes, beetroot and radishes, as well as planting out some marigolds to help keep some insect pests away :D
We then had a lovely rest and then chose and planted out sunflower seeds for the growing competition. We'll judge the cometition at the beginning of August! GOOD LUCK TO EVERYONE!