Mistletoe (plus Giles Brandreth and I) featured on TV, again, last night, but in a slightly different context to usual.  The short feature, actually filmed last August, was part of a series on The One Show about Days of the Week – in this case Friday, obviously. What’s the link?  Well it’s all to to with the Norse Goddess Frigg, for whom Friday is named.  And her son, Balder the Beautiful, who was villainously slain […]

After yesterday’s female Blackcap-eating-mistletoe pictures I thought I’d try and get a male today.  We’ve got one that appears every now and then, but he frequents the waste mistletoe pile further away from the window, and is more difficult to photograph. [Of course there may be several others nearby, of both sexes, but they only ever appear one at a time – rarely two, and then one chases the other away.] But he did come closer a […]

We’ve been very busy this week preparing mistletoe grow-kits; cropping mistletoe, cutting it up to leave just the tips, then carefully cutting off the berries with a weeny bit of stalk (otherwise they leach goo everywhere), and then packing them along with all the other grow-kit bits to be sent out.  It’s surprisingly hard work, and I have a cricked neck to prove it.  This is due to stretching up with extending poles to reach mistletoe each morning and then […]

The ‘Mistletoe League Project‘, collecting data on mistletoe on fruit trees – varietal preferences and management – is now fully functioning online.  This follows a couple of months of partial functionality, as the survey software was being closed down.  We now have new survey software courtesy of Lime, and all sections, including Part 2, are now live. Full details are on the Project website but for those interested here are some  quick links to the various survey […]