{"id":27297,"date":"2021-02-04T19:37:29","date_gmt":"2021-02-04T18:37:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.edimentals.com\/blog\/?p=27297"},"modified":"2025-12-15T16:18:53","modified_gmt":"2025-12-15T15:18:53","slug":"moths-in-the-edible-garden","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.edimentals.com\/blog\/?p=27297","title":{"rendered":"Moths in The Edible Garden"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

NB! The album and information at the bottom will be added to over time<\/strong><\/em>
When I was a student in Edinburgh in the late 70s, I started in earnest to learn the names of birds, butterflies and wild plants. Then, when I moved to Norway I became interested in fungi, but really didn\u2019t have the time to learn more than the common and edible species. In the 1990s, developing what has become known as The Edible Garden, essentially a Forest Garden or Food Forest with a huge diversity of edible plants, a kind of Food Forest Ethno-Botanical Garden. I noticed that, with the diversity of food plants in the garden, there were many pollinators attracted to the flowers of some of the plants, some attracted to one species, others to many different plants. Some uncommon in this area birds and butterflies started turning up in my garden like a) the goldfinch (stillits) attracted to the seed of greater burdock \/ borre (Arctium lappa<\/em>) which I had planted as a vegetable and b) the peacock butterfly (dagp\u00e5fugl\u00f8ye) which had only once been observed in my county before and I registered this beautiful species many times between 2006-2010; one of its larval foodplants is stinging nettle, a species I had actively encouraged in the wild parts of the garden as food and for making fertilizer (nettle water) and another is hops (Humulus lupulus<\/em>) which I had planted several plants of. I had also planted a couple of Buddleja davidii <\/em>(butterfly bush \/sommerfuglbusk) plants for the butterflies. Mum and Dad had a bush in their garden when I was growing up and they had a framed butterfly poster on the wall so that the butterflies that turned up could be identified. This and the I-SPY book about birds they bought us certainly tweeked my interest in the natural world. The peacocks loved the Buddleja<\/em> as well as the hemp agrimony (Eupatorium cannabinum<\/em>) I had grown from seed collected from plants growing on the Itchen River in Hampshire (I had noticed how much butterflies loved this one) and which continued the season after the Buddleja<\/em> was finished. I started wondering what other interesting insects were here. I had recorded a few moths that were attracted to the outside light, but I\u2019d always wanted to know more of what was here that I wasn\u2019t seeing. I therefore bought a Skinner Moth Trap and through the Corona crisis I\u2019ve been systematically documenting moths that turn up in my garden (the moths are released afterwards). I\u2019ve been absolutely stunned by the diversity that is here and to find out that a moth is here because I planted the larval food plant is particularly exciting. I\u2019ll be gradually presenting the different species in this album as they turned up in the garden through the season starting in April. Below the album can be found a complete list of species and information about their larval food plants.
14th February 2021: A peculiarity of living so far north is that it is so light at night that moths are no longer attracted to light, so the period around mid-summer isn’t well documented.
19th February 2021: 19 of the first 25 species are new for my munipality, Malvik Kommune*\u00a0 the others all have between 1 to 3 records previously!

The intention here is to document that producing food CAN be done in a way that also nurtures the nature of the place.\u00a0<\/p>\n