Coton Loves Pollinators 🐝 🍃💚🍃

Been buzzing about helping pollinators in Coton and neighboring communities for a while now but only joined @Twitter today in order to help @CotonBusway #SaveOurGreenCorridors and protect #Biodiversity.

@RedSpudd Keeping fingers crossed for us 🤞🏻⛈️🐝

@CotonBuzz We're on the edge of the thunderstorm warning so we'll probably get nothing.

Temperature has been rattling around 35C for a couple of hours, peak was 35.9C. We do have the odd cloud appearing now though - fingers and toes crossed for a good downpour later.

@briar_farm Feeling a bit desperate here too 🥵

It’s a brutal scene here at the farm. Lots of water and heat stressed plants. Yesterday was a record breaking temperature for May, with a similar outlook today. This heat, compounded with drought, late frosts and strong winds, make for an incredibly complex growing environment.

@RedSpudd Was out watering what we could yesterday, brutal heat 🥵

More than 8 hours at or above 30C in the back garden with a peak of 34.5C. Same again tomorrow?

@VenetiaJane Gorgeous 😍

Peony time is upon us; great ruffled blooms in shades of blush, cream, coral and gold, glowing like silk in the late May light. A flower long linked with healing, protection and prosperity, and one of the true show-stoppers of the garden. #BankHolidayMonday 🌸

@wildflower_hour The pollinator meadow is putting on quite a #WildflowerShow today 🐝

It’s Sunday & it’s 8pm so it must be time for #wildflowerhour! Please share your pics of the wild & naturalised plants you’ve spotted blooming across Britain & Ireland in the last week, especially if they were looking particularly stunning for this week’s #WildflowerShow!

Delighted to see that another of our collaborations with @onthevergecambs is coming to life 🦋🐝

@derriennebell Sorry to learn you’re hurt Derri, we wondered where you were when we dropped by the college. Wishing you a full and swift recovery ♥️🐝

@SarahWoods66 My Chelsea visit even worse…fell over at the train station going, been in hospital 2 days now with a torn hamstring and now they are saying fracture in the hip!!! I was rushing to try and get help with the train ticket as machine not cooperating and no one around to help. Xxx

Not my usual tweet but I want a little rant. I got gifted 2 tickets to the Chelsea Flower Show so went with a friend yesterday. We paid for an overnight stay in a hotel, train fares and food. I can honestly say it was AWFUL. It was unbelievably busy with huge numbers of people making it impossible to walk - we were just shoved along by the crowd. I couldn’t see any of the show gardens because the fight to see them was 5 people deep. Even if you did get to the front you were being pressured to move on. We gave up after 3 hours and went to the Chelsea Physic Garden along the road which was a much welcome oasis of calm. The organisers of the show should be ashamed of themselves. Visitor numbers need limiting and I feel so sorry for anyone for whom this was a first time long awaited visit #RHSChelsea #RHSChelseaFlowerShow @GWandShows @GWandShows @The_RHS

This meadow prepared and seeded with wildflowers last year by @AstraZeneca volunteers…

Taking a bug’s eye view of Coton Orchard this morning with members of Cambridge Moth Group & @onthevergecambs 🔍🐝

Blues 🦋

One of our pollinator patches has exploded into colour. Seeded by @onthevergecambs last year 🐝

Thank you @tomjksn and @BBCCambs for visiting Coton Orchard to see our new solar powered Pollinator Patch. 🍎☀️💧🐝 Sunshine for power, rainwater for plants, and a little more space for pollinators and people to thrive. 📻 Listen back: 1:28:13 & 3:40:3 bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0…

Huge thanks to @PolysolarPV for installing their @The_RHS Chelsea Flower Show silver medal winning agrivoltaic greenhouse in Coton. Transparent solar panels generating electricity for our tools and irrigation system while growing plants for our pollinator patches. 🌱☀️🐝

@markrwilliamson Wonder how the 50,000 replacement trees on the A14 are doing? Anyone know? @jonnycaribouthe? We’re struggling to keep the ones we planted last winter watered and alive. Choosing to return most of them to enclosures nearer a water source to plant again next year.

With Cambs being used as a ‘testbed for innovative water interventions’ as England faces shortfall of five billion litres per day by 2050 - here’s a bit by me on how it’s going.

@markrwilliamson Efficiency helps, but no saving system works without rain, as our near empty butts in the pollinator patches are already showing. We’re watering saplings by hand and it’s only May. More people each using “a bit less” still means greater demand on supplies already under strain.

Water shortfall of five billion litres per day in England by 2050 is cited to the Climate Change Committee report today. Their suggestions are largely already factored into official plans.

@TonyJuniper Testing on a much smaller scale in Coton: lightweight transparent photovoltaic panels on greenhouses and polytunnels ☀️

One way to solve any land use conflict between solar power generation & food production.

@Kaulofthewilduk Here too, and the swallows and house martins.

The Swifts have returned the Swifts have returned the Swifts have returned the Swifts have returned the Swifts have returned the Swifts have returned the Swifts have returned the Swifts have returned the Swifts have returned the Swifts have returned the Swifts have returned

@RedSpudd We’re just discussing about what to plant and where based on how we’re going to keep things watered. As you say, it seems like we’ve had a fair bit of rain but checking the water butts today most barely have anything in them.

Aah May, you're flattering to deceive! It seems like we've had a decent bit of rain lately with repeated damp days, but it all adds up to less than 15mm. We need another 28mm to get to an average May and the forecast now is hot and dry for the next week.

Celebrating Coton’s bees on #WorldBeeDay 🐝

For the Love of Bees 🐝 #WorldBeeDay These tiny creatures, going about their lives unseen, hold together systems far larger than themselves — systems on which we utterly depend When they falter, it exposes a deeper truth: that our dominance over nature is an illusion, and that care, not control, is what sustains us @CIWF_Global philiplymbery.com/for-the-love-o…