Moths and Me
Mill Pond Flower Farm - a flower farm alongside a mill pond!
Until 2020, moths were in the background of my life. Fluttery creatures that passed by in the dusk, played percussion on the polytunnel plastic and wafted away when disturbed, I’d never really thought a lot about them. As an urban child, I was terrified of daddy-long-legs and nervous of spiders, the idea of actively seeking out insects definitely wouldn’t have appealed. However, in 2020 the world changed, in more ways than one. I’d been a flower farmer for 8 years, growing and selling cut flowers from our 4 acre smallholding, halfway up a hill in the Scottish borders. It was a good business, using all my skills from varied previous careers and building gently, enough to also include my husband Ray as a part-timer.
In March 2020, I had a sound plan for the coming flower season, a solid wholesale customer list, bookings for wedding flowers and a loyal local market for bouquets and bunches. The polytunnels and field were full of plants heading towards flowers and I was anticipating a successful year. We went into full lockdown in the third week of March, just after Mother’s Day when we’d done outdoor, socially distanced bouquet handovers and in a state of disbelief. Thousands of blooms waiting for weddings & celebrations coming ready in the next few months that were all cancelled in one fell swoop. Like many other small, relatively new businesses, we were forced to ‘pivot’ to survive, adapt our plans every time the guidance and restrictions were changed and bump along without any certainty about what was coming next. It was stressful, difficult, challenging, upsetting, frightening. We worked harder to survive, planning and replanning, heads full of testing, distancing, masks and handwashing.
In the middle of all this, I had an online chat with a flower customer whose husband Barry was the County Moth Recorder for Berwickshire. She said he was really missing getting out into the countryside with his moth trap. Barry had left a portable moth trap with Ray (who he’d met at a local school’s event) and I blithely offered to put it out to see what was flying if Barry would help with the identifying. And that’s how it started.