{"id":625,"date":"2010-05-21T11:38:21","date_gmt":"2010-05-21T11:38:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/?p=625"},"modified":"2010-05-21T11:38:21","modified_gmt":"2010-05-21T11:38:21","slug":"in-the-garden-vines-and-bees","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/uncategorized\/in-the-garden-vines-and-bees","title":{"rendered":"In the garden, vines and bees"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/05\/IMGP0449.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-626\" title=\"IMGP0449\" src=\"http:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/05\/IMGP0449.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"600\" height=\"398\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/05\/IMGP0449.jpg 600w, https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/05\/IMGP0449-300x199.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/05\/IMGP0449-150x99.jpg 150w, https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/05\/IMGP0449-400x265.jpg 400w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve begun to appreciate bees a great deal more since I read <a href=\"http:\/\/www.coupland.com\/2009\/03\/30\/book-generation-a-2\/\" target=\"_blank\">Douglas Coupland&#8217;s latest novel<\/a>. Anyway, there are a lot of them in the garden this year, mainly because I&#8217;ve decided to allow whatever grows to grow, taking a more natural approach. The result is a rash of colour from the wild flowers.<\/p>\n<p>I sprayed my vines for the first time this season. Sulphur, for the control of powdery mildew. It&#8217;s hard to get hold of wettable sulphur unless you have a proper vineyard, so I just use the sulphur dust you can get from most garden centres, make it wettable by grinding it in a pestle and mortar with a few drops of detergent (I use Ecover washing up liquid), and then mix it with water.<\/p>\n<p>The flowers pictured above are green alkanet (<em>Pentaglottis sempervirens<\/em>). It&#8217;s actually quite an invasive weed, but it&#8217;s pretty and the bees like it. It was introduced to the UK from southwest France for a dye that can be extracted from its roots. You can eat the flowers; they&#8217;re sometimes used to dress salads. \u00a0The bee is a hovering solitary bee, with an amazingly long proboscis. Beautiful insect.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve begun to appreciate bees a great deal more since I read Douglas Coupland&#8217;s latest novel. Anyway, there are a lot of them in the garden this year, mainly because&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-625","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=625"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":627,"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625\/revisions\/627"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}