Shield bugs are proliferating in the garden. These ones seem to like the tomato plants in particular.

I believe they are Nezara viridula, or Southern Shield Bugs, from the family Pentatomidae. The little family here shows them at various stages in their development: they pass through five different colour-patterned stages called ‘instars’ before transforming into their more familiar all-green adult form. It seems that this type only established itself in England in 2003.

See britishbugs.org.uk and blockhill.co.nz (another Garden Zine of sorts) for more info.

Solar panel vs Salvia. The salvia will be the clear winner without human intervention. I will move the panel back for now, to allow it to capture more sun rays; the plant can be cut back later in the year. The garden is truly Knepp-like at the moment, after being left to its own devices while the humans were travelling.

I imagine a plant-like solar harvester that can autonomously reach towards the sun like a plant stem or a tree branch. I did see a design once, for an array of solar panels which was modelled on the leaves of a tree. Could woods of tree-like solar harvesters replace fields of solar panels one day?

Finally the rain came and there was a day of cloudy skies. The garden exhaled a sigh of relief. The server is not accessible: it looks like this could be the end of the continuous summer uptime. I will wait and post this update when and if it comes back online. I will be travelling for a while so I won’t be able to do a hands-on check and there will be a delay before I upload the post.

I hope the reboot mechanism for the Raspberry Pi will work: it’s only been tested once, on the day that I set the site up. The new battery didn’t have a full charge, so it ran out of power quite quickly and the server shut down. It came back up successfully the next day, and stayed up for the next 80 something days.

Update, two weeks later: the server reboot is working as designed. However the log files weren’t being read properly by the stats page. Hopefully fixed now. The server shutdowns are more regular now that the days are shortening and the sunshine is less constant, so we’ll see soon enough if it is working properly.

What happened to the magpies?

A pair of magpies visited the garden most days throughout the summer. They ate the sunflower seeds distributed by the goldfinches feeding messily at the bird feeder. They also showed a bold intelligence by venturing into the house, when the kitchen door was open, to take kibble from the dog’s bowl. They were extremely cautious and would only risk this if the kitchen was empty; but often they would announce themselves loudly while entering the house – perhaps as a means of flushing out any nearby humans or dogs.

Working upstairs, this became a familiar set of sounds – a squawking announcement from downstairs, followed by the rattle of the metal dog bowl as they collected beakfuls of dried dog food, before hopping back out to safety.

They spent so much time in the garden that it became a problem at times – they would crap on clothes drying outside on the clothes line, or on the handle of the kitchen door, when perching there to check for safe passage to a free lunch.

In the last month or so they have been largely absent. Perhaps it was a mother and child, and the visits were to provide nourishment to the growing offspring. I’m still hopeful that they will come back again.

I set up a remote camera to capture their kitchen visits.

I spent quite a long time experimenting with SVG animations in an attempt to convert this video into a small-size format, as part of my attempts to keep this website fast-to-load and low in energy consumption. It turned out that converting to a standard compressed video format resulted in a much smaller file size than any of the alternatives. Perhaps a compressed video capture of an SVG animation would be smaller still? I will try that next.

Testing setup

In situ

‘Waterproofed’ server box

The Plastic Box

Inside The Box

Collaborators

Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising given the extreme weather we have been having in London – the hottest year I have experienced in the UK in my lifetime, with endless weeks of sunshine and little or no rain – but my solar-powered web server has been running continuously since I set it up at the end of May. That’s 59 days on sun and battery power alone, at the time of writing.

For the vast majority of that time it has not been accessible to the web and has just been sitting there serving the nginx default page. It will be interesting to see how long it stays up for if traffic increases and the days get shorter and less sunny.

It may be that my solar panel is overspecified? (190W)

You can see the uptime stats here.

Who lives in The Garden?

A preliminary ecosystem list: to be expanded

• soil
• plantlife
• solar panel and web server
• humans // sometimes be-hammocked
• dog // patrols, sleeps
• foxes // take over the local garden spaces at night
• frogs
• snails
• birds // some regular, some occasional visitors from One Tree Hill
  • goldfinch
  • blue tit
  • great tit
  • parakeet
  • wood pigeon
  • feral pigeon
  • magpie // also enters the house to take dog food
  • robin
  • sparrow
  • dunnock
  • jackdaw
  • jay (occasional)
  • greater spotted woodpecker (occasional)
• insects
  • where to begin/end?
• mice
• rats
• cats // neighbours’

The site of The Garden was once common land, then farmland. In 1878 a small grid of roads was built on what had been farmer’s fields, adjoining the main road, and houses with gardens were built there. In 1890 the remains of the farm to the north were bought by the Camberwell Vestry, to expand the local common, and developed into Peckham Rye Park, which was opened four years later.

When The Garden was still a farmer’s field.
From GB/Ireland OS Six inch map, 1830s-1880s

Thus the site of The Garden is between Peckham Rye Park to the north and a wooded hill to the south, a remnant of the Great North Wood known as One Tree Hill.

The little estate of roads did not originally include the house with The Garden. The grid was expanded eastwards at some point, into what had been cricket grounds, to allow for further house building. Documents suggest that the house belonging to The Garden was built in the late 1920s, but the extended part of the road doesn’t appear on maps until later, in post-WW2 maps.

For viewing historical maps of the UK side-by-side, for comparison of different time periods, look at the wonderful National Library of Scotland website.