A visit to Ryton Organic Gardens – 2 of 2
Wednesday, July 8th, 2009
Ok, as I didn’t want to write an epic post last night -although that’s what it almost turned into, I thought I’d finish it off tonight. I think so far I’ve said we liked the place but weren’t too impressed with the range or quality of the vegetables.
The greenhouse/focal point in the gardens – above – is a really beautiful structure although I’m not sure it would quite fit into Vegmonkey Towers. The most exciting thing i found in there was the Greenfinch below, I know it’s dead and not very attractive, but there’s a purpose to this story. After pointing it out to some people working in the gardens, they spotted that it had a metal tag on its leg, that said ‘British Museum, London’ on it. So, upon getting home I did some research, as I do.
Turns out it wasn’t from the British Museum at all, but refers to the National History Museum – under the umbrella of the British Trust for Ornithology…who do bird tagging. Something to do with people of a foreign nature (see what I did there?!..nature…?!) being able to read the words British and Museum. I read here that they have 2400 ‘taggers’ ringing over 800,000 birds a year!
The view from the top of the mini hill (that we weren’t meant to slide down…) below was good as we could see a lot going on.
Anyway, back to flowers, most of the nice ones were covered in some form of aphids but i managed to caoture this wasp like bee fly hovering, which was nice.
On the fruit front, somewhere we are looking to venture soon, Ryton does very well – a really nice area with all sorts of varieties of raspberries, gooseberries and so on. The only thing that confused me was the lack of a roof on the cage, just a lot of string, wired over the top…does this keep the birds out?
Right, almost finished. The best bit about the whole place is below. The seed shop. The restaurant was nice and the food was good, but the seed shop…it was epic. I picked up a catalogue and thumbed through it as i walked up and down the aisle. The result you ask? £30 is the answer, but I got lots of exciting stuff to grow!
All in all, a nice day out, but now the search is on for something better!
