Time to blabber on about my old balcony again! (For bamboo thing, go to the bottom)
I've made some GIFs this time to keep it a bit more interesting.
A ton of things would be going on at any given time on my balcony. Not only was there my own personal gardening efforts, but the private bamboo garden below me would loom above me and, in the rain, arch overhead creating almost a gateway of bamboo. Pretty cool.
But it wasn't all bamboo. A tree which I'm pretty sure is considered a weed managed to grow between some electric boxes and the wooden fence, even squeezing its own bark flat in order to accommodate the small space, towering above and then blossoming - it's the first thing I see as soon as I open my back door.
My back door is in my bedroom, and my bed faces the door. So, every morning I would have the back door open, lying in bed, seeing the top of a blossoming tree as my morning view!
Not only that but it attracted plenty of birds too, so I could listen to AND watch the birds collecting nectar directly from my bed (no I didn't keep nectar in my bed, I just can't think of a better way to phrase that sentence).
At certain times of the years, the outside area becomes bug crazy, with bees, wasps, pseudo-bee fly-things, ladybirds, armies of ants, dragonflies, countless butterflies and more. My own garden brought even more, including the giant black bee I'd never seen before, a lot of millipede-type things in the soil, cool hunting and jumping spiders and so on. I truly enjoyed contributing a tiny bit to biodiversity while also enjoying this tiny maintained bamboo garden.
Who can identify them all? XD
One of the best things about the lockdown for me was this garden beneath me, as the gates were locked and nobody entered or maintained it the entire time. The bamboo seemed to be aware of this and took serious advantage.
You might have heard occasionally that bamboo is the fastest growing plant, up to 30cm a day, or something along those lines. It's so fast that it's possible to even hear it grow, as a slow creaking sound in a forest.
Well, in this garden I noticed a few stumps of bamboo growing where there was no bamboo before. The next day, I noticed it was twice the size somehow. After a couple of days it had gone from a few inches tall, to over a metre, and it was at this point I decided to timelapse it and see what was going on.
Unfortunately, I was still doing my day job most days and by the weekend I would have missed my chance to timelapse the best bit anyway so I tried to abandon my phone as long as possible while it recorded only a couple of hours of footage. But that couple of hours alone was stunning,
I'm not kidding. This is a Two Hour time lapse.
Previously I mentioned how a giant Bee-type insect, possibly a bee, came to my garden to reap the rewards from the sunflower blooms. Of all the bugs above, I had never seen such a huge bee in all my years in China, let alone shanghai. But somehow, here it is. I wonder how far it flew to be there.
I love how jam-packed his knees are with pollen
Well that's about it for today, hope you enjoyed - it took me forever to figure out how to turn these last videos into GIFs. So many errors I was ready to kill something (Not the bee).
wow! I've never seen insects up close. You took really beautiful photos.
Thanks! Old phone but its camera consistently impresses everybody and outshines any latest iPhone
You are welcome. My phone is an old iphone. İts camera is getting worse day by day.
Bamboo grows so quickly and can be used for many things. I've used it to create a quick growing hedge to provide shade for some plants and it took just a few months. Love it! 😄
Yeah I'm pretty sure it's banned in the UK though cause it would just take over the entire country!
Probably! We had some pampus grass in our garden when we were young and it turned into an uncontrollable bush. All grasses shoot up pretty quick!
What a view to wake up to every morning and also enjoy whenever you're home.
The pics of the insects are very cool and as clear as a bell. Even though you are on the other side of the globe, many of the insects you captured are very similiar to the bugs around here.
The time lapse GIF's are awesome. The one of the bamboo growing is crazy. From a sapling to a tree in the matter of a few days.
Fun read, thanks for sharing!
Yeah I noticed a lot of the bugs seem familiar. I've googled a few and often they actually originate from here and carry over the world, sometimes vice versa. Globalisation, eh?
It's hard to even kill bamboo since it just shoots up from connected root systems underground kinda like mint! Pretty fun/scary
I read that there are 1.4 billion insects per human.
I've got a friend of mine that planted bamboo on the side of his hard to give him some privacy and the stuff took over. In the matter of a few years the stuff was so thick it was impossible to get through the stuff. It started to encroach on his neighbor's property and he had to remove it which was almost impossible.
I've heard about the speed at which bamboo can grow. It's an amazing thing. You have a couple of insects there that I can't identify which is wonderful! Never stop learning. Can you tell me what number 10 is? It looks like a sap sucking bug with white spots.
Yeah I thought they always exaggerated bamboo's skills, but seems not!
The bug is just a type of ladybird/ladybug - An orange ladybird!
Cool! We don't get the orange Ladybugs here.