Teacher educator, researcher and education manager. Bird watcher and gardener. Currently in Astana Kazakhstan, but my heart is still in and with Ukraine! 🇺🇦❤️
Kazakhstan
Joined January 2018
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Back in beautiful summery Astana! Good to be home, but genuinely missing the west of Ireland Atlantic coastline!
Planting peony this autumn. Such a brilliant blousy plant! 🌱
The peony is planted once, chooses its position for life, and can flower for a century. Here is what to get right before the first tuber goes in the ground. 🌸
Position — choose carefully
Minimum 6 hours of sun per day — morning sun is ideal. Rich, moisture-retentive, well-drained soil: improve with well-rotted compost and bone meal before planting. Peonies resent being moved. Choose the permanent position from the start.
Planting — the mistake that costs years
Plant from October to November during dormancy. Locate the eyes (the red or pink buds) on the rhizome. Plant them at a maximum depth of 3–5 cm — no deeper. Plant the eyes deeper than 5 cm and the plant will grow lush foliage but may not flower for 3 to 5 years. Space plants 80 cm to 1 metre apart.
Watering
Water regularly through the first year to support establishment. After that, water only during extended dry spells — established peonies are drought-tolerant.
Feeding — at the right moment
Apply a top dressing of compost or slow-release balanced fertiliser after flowering (May–June), not before. This feeds the rhizome and prepares next year's flowers. Avoid high-nitrogen feeds in spring — they promote foliage at the expense of flowers.
Maintenance
Deadhead spent flowers before petals drop — this prevents fungal disease. Cut stems to the ground in autumn when they yellow. Never cut back the foliage in summer — it feeds the rhizome for next year.
All parts of the plant are toxic. Wear gloves when handling.
Not flowering
— Were the eyes planted too deep
— Is the plant getting enough sun
— Was it moved recently
Planted correctly once, a herbaceous peony can flower every spring for more than fifty years — some clumps exceed a century. 🌿
#Peonies #HerbaceousBorder #PerennialGarden #UKGardening
Simon retweeted
Before you pull that "weed," take a quick look at what it actually is.
The violet spreading through your lawn is the sole host plant for all 14 species of greater fritillary butterflies in North America. The caterpillars eat nothing else. If your yard has violets and your neighbor's doesn't, your yard may be the sole key to a butterfly's survival.
Fleabane, those small daisy-like flowers that pop up in disturbed ground, is an early-season nectar source for native bees and one of the first things blooming after the dandelions finish. Bees find it. Skippers find it. Beetles find it.
The plantain, the broad-leafed one with the parallel veins, is the host plant for the buckeye butterfly and also one of the first plants colonizing disturbed ground, meaning it's stabilizing your soil while feeding insects.
It arrived in North America with European settlers and spread so thoroughly the Wampanoag called it "Englishman's foot." It's everywhere because it's good at surviving. So are the things that depend on it.
None of these are failures of your lawn, but a sign your lawn is doing something useful. A short patch left uncut in a corner, or even a deliberate tolerance for what's already there, can provide host plants and early nectar at a moment in the season when almost nothing else is blooming.
The question isn't whether it looks like a weed. The question is what's eating it.
Simon retweeted
🇷🇺 Russia is running an influence operation in plain sight. Fly in every Western grievance influencer, walk them down three polished streets, and have them file dispatches about paradise while X gets carpet-bombed with migrant crime clips from Europe.
This clip is a perfect specimen. Women strutting past Red Square as proof that Moscow is safe and pure, watermarked by a Russian content team. His “candid street footage” is a choreographed shoot, produced, branded and exported for exactly this purpose. The man is posting the brochure and calling it a window.
And what a brochure it is. Russia has roughly one and a half presentable city centres, downtown Moscow and the nice bits of St. Petersburg, spread across a continent spanning eleven time zones. Everything between them is the part the content teams don’t film. That’s why every one of these clips is shot on the same three streets: it’s not a country being shown off, it’s a film set being reused.
The rest of the paradise: largest Muslim population in Europe, millions of Central Asian migrants doing the work, a murder rate several times Western Europe’s, and wife-beating downgraded to a parking ticket in 2017. Over 2,000 women killed by their partners in two years, per Russia’s own women’s organisations.
“Unafraid, unmolested, completely safe.” Sure. Just don’t marry a Russian.
Meanwhile, here’s Europe: two girls dancing in the rain outside an apartment block, filmed by a neighbour through the bushes. No choreography, no content agency, no Red Square backdrop. Just people living their lives, completely unaware they’re supposed to be drowning in decay and despair. That’s the bit the Kremlin can’t manufacture. Spontaneity doesn’t take direction.
One of these clips needed a production company. Europe just needed two girls and some rain.
Gandalv / @Microinteracti1
Not seeing any migrants, violent Muslim thugs, or drug addicts on the streets of Moscow, Russia 🇷🇺.
All I see is beautiful white women, living their best life. Unafraid, unmolested, & completely safe.
Vladimir Putin knows how to keep his people safe, unlike Western Europe.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Anecdotal street-level observations in one city do not provide reliable evidence about national crime, migration, or public safety trends. Russia's intentional homicide rate is several times higher than the EU average.
nationmaster.com/country-info/c…
Simon retweeted
We live and breathe this and have done for 20 years and i am happy to say a growing number of farmers are leading a quiet but powerful movement to restore the land they love too. Regenerative farming is about more than growing food; it's about rebuilding healthy soils, welcoming wildlife back into our landscapes, and leaving the land in better heart for the generations that follow. Farmers are not the problem, we are part of the solution ❤️
Love this!
Along rural roads in Ireland, small honesty shelves quietly offer fresh produce to passing travelers. Eggs, bread, and fruit are placed out in simple displays, with no staff present to manage the exchange.
People take what they need and leave payment behind, relying entirely on trust rather than supervision. The system works through mutual respect, where both the seller and buyer participate in keeping it fair.
Over time, these shelves become part of the landscape’s rhythm. They show how simple trust can sustain everyday transactions turning a roadside stop into a shared understanding between strangers.
Simon retweeted
On the topic of ‘just get on with it’ this is one of our smaller nature reserves. From finding the land for sale, buying it, planting 100,000 trees and digging 6 ponds it took less than 18 months to create a new haven for nature. @paulpowlesland
Simon retweeted
"Picturesque river polluted with sewage just 13 days after being given official bathing status."
Yep the River Avon at Salisbury was designated as a bathing spot on 15th May and just 13 days later on the 28th the EA have to issue a pollution warning due to E. coli levels. What a shambles.
independent.co.uk/news/uk/ho…
Simon retweeted
Trump has just destroyed the US beef industry. No country in their right mind is going to import US beef.
After Trump cut funding for Screwworm monitoring programs, the dangerous flesh-eating parasite has been found in US cattle for the first time since 1966.
Simon retweeted
This is awful. The last ever Denby Pottery going to the kiln. Why is there not uproar? Where’s the government in this?? We all have Denby in our homes, in family heirlooms, as our history and now it’s closing through lack of support, such a sad sad day. #SaveDenby @denbypottery
Simon retweeted
“On long, serene midsummer days
Of ripening fruit and yellowed grain,
How sweetly, by dim woodland ways,
In tangled hedge or leafy lane,
Fair wild rose thickets, you unfold
Those pale pink stars with hearts of gold!”
- from ‘Wild Roses’ by Edgar Fawcett (1847-1904) #wildflowers
ALT Collage celebrating the wild rose. A decorative lithograph of ‘Wild Rose’ by Maurice Pillard Verneuil from Eugène Grasset’s Plants and their Application to Ornament (1897) is shown alongside photographs of pale pink wild rose blossoms growing amongst green hedgerow foliage. A close-up reveals a thorn on a stem, and a larger image highlights a single flower with golden stamens.
About bloody time!
”Last year almost 500 000 Russian tourists were let into Europe, while Ukrainians were dying on the battlefield. This situation needs to be stopped.
That is why we, together with 10 other Member States, have put forward an initiative for new EU visa restrictions for Russian citizens.” @JohanForssell at JHA
Being human and kind always works!
In a groundbreaking social initiative, Albuquerque, New Mexico launched a program that pays homeless individuals to clean streets, parks, and public areas.
The idea was simple — offers work, dignity, and purpose instead of punishment or pity.
The results were remarkable: over 70% of participants have now secured permanent housing or full-time employment, transforming their lives and communities alike. The city’s “There’s a Better Way” program proves that compassion-driven policies can be more effective than traditional welfare systems.
