It’s Day 13 of 30 Days Wild and I really don’t know where the time has gone today! I haven’t ended up doing any of the things I intended to, but have done a few things on the spur of the moment instead. Nothing monumental, just a quiet, pottering kind of day.

It started off well (albeit at 04:30 in the morning) when I found a Ghost Moth in the trap. I’ve wanted to find one of these for ages, especially after I saw a couple on a Wildlife Trust “moth breakfast” last year. This is also one of the few species where I can say with confidence that I’ve caught a female one. The females are yellow like this and the males are a more ghost like white (although they both have the same Trump-like yellow wig on the head!).

After that the day seemed to slow down a bit, partly due to a couple of trips to the vet with our elderly diabetic cat Bert (all well, just routine check up).  Hanging around waiting to pick Bert up again gave me time to finally get round to starting the elderflower champagne, with the now slightly elderly elderflower heads I’d picked last week. Many thanks to Christine Lucas for her recipe (https://redpanda08.wordpress.com/2017/06/07/30-days-wild-2017-week-1/) which I’ve tweeked only slightly because we happened to have an orange in the fridge! Fingers crossed it produces something resembling the stuff I remember from childhood.

Feeling like I was on a roll, I checked the fridge to see what else needed using up. We’ve got a glut of strawberries & raspberries from the allotment at the moment and there’s only so many bowls of them you can eat just straight. So in a rare fit of baking enthusiasm (although this was actually a no-bake recipe) I made a strawberry cheesecake. There’s something really satisfying about making something with fruit you’ve not only picked but grown yourself! Although by the end of the summer when we’ve had strawberries every night, I might not be quite so enthusiastic about them!

Once Bert was safely back home, I headed down the allotment to do a bit of the never ending weeding. Things are really coming along down on the lottie now. Latest addition were these pak choi – I seem to be incapable of going into a garden centre (or in this case a certain well known DIY store) without coming out with more vegetable seedlings – hence the tub of these.

We’ve also got a couple of tubs of mixed salad leaves, grown from seed and doing remarkably well. No idea what any of it is, but there’s plenty so it’s a bowl of side salad again for dinner tonight!

Back from the lottie and into the greenhouse to water the motley assortment of plants I’ve got in there. I spotted this wasp’s nest that has clearly been there some time, but for some reason I’ve never noticed it before.

If the weather’s still OK by the time Chris gets home from work, we may manage to eat our salad and cheesecake outside, otherwise it’s dinner in front of Springwatch as usual! It may not have been the “wildest” of days, but spending a few hours in the fresh air pottering down the lottie and tinkering about in the kitchen using things I’ve picked myself, is a great way of recharging the batteries.