Becoming Domestic

Hmmm. I’ve just been watching the boldest, chunkiest rat while I did the washing up. He/she/it was waddling around the path in the garden, popped up the apple tree and sat looking at me then waddled back down, had a sniff around the drain and the rubbish bin (no lid and generally has refuse sacks containing the week’s waste complete with holes made by a mystery creature) then waddled back to where I presume it sleeps in the ex-outdoor toilet which is now used as a garden store.

Until I came upstairs I thought little of the latest visible wildlife in our garden other than a fleeting ‘Gosh aren’t they sweet looking, nimble and intelligent too’

Turns out they have nasty diseases, nasty habits (like popping themselves up nearby sewage pipes and into one’s lavatory), can cause nasty things to happen (especially if they chomp through household electricity cables) and the only thing to do if you have signs of rats living near your premises are to kill the blighters. The best way to kill them is apparently with a rat trap.

Great. It wasn’t something I had on the to-do list but here goes - better start getting rid of them before they get the better of us and start being really cheeky like coming into the house. I’m a bit scared of traps though as I imagine they would hurt A LOT if it went off on a human finger or toe and with two daft five year olds living with us I guess we’ll have to wait until after their bedtime to set the things up.

The following advice is taken from the very helpful page at King County:

Rats are dangerous! They can ruin your food, destroy things in your home and start electrical fires. Rats and their fleas can carry disease.

Where do rats live outside?* Under wood piles or lumber that is not being used often
* Under bushes, vines and in tall grasses that are not trimmed or cut back
* Under rocks in the garden
* In cars, appliances and furniture that has been put outside and is no longer being used
* In and around trash and garbage that has been left on the ground
* In holes under buildings

Where do rats live inside the home?

* In the insulation of walls or ceilings
* Inside the crawl spaces
* Behind or under cupboards, counters, bathtubs and shower stalls
* Near hot water heaters and furnaces
* In basements, attics and wherever things are stored in boxes, paper or cloth

What foods brings rats into my yard and neighborhood?

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve got a new veg patch and it has many tender seedlings and young plants growing nicely which I’ve tended to with more care than my own children. We’ve had to ensure it is rabbit proof by completely surrounding it with chicken wire fencing dug deep into the ground as there are loads of rabbits in the field next door.

Only a true city dweller nutter would start encouraging a sweet little fluffy baby bunny to stay in the lawned area of the garden by leaving tasty carrot morsels and shooing the neighbours cat away in case it devours the poor little mite. I can’t help myself. He/she looks so lost and vunerable and appears most evenings and mornings from behind the shed and compost area.

I still feel so very lucky to have so much wildlife appearing in our garden each day. Only yesterday I saw two different types of woodpecker and a goldfinch.

This weekend I paid a visit to my remarkable friend Jane who lives on Skomer Island, Pembrokeshire (a large rock in the Atlantic ocean just off the coast of south western Wales).

Jane won’t mind me saying that I was completely humbled by seeing where she lives with her young daughter Martha and her partner Juan.

They are incredible people to chose to live in such a remote location. Juan has held the position of Skomer’s resident warden for about nine years while Jane has lived there with him for the past four. They are the only permanent residents on the island but even they are forced to evacuate due to severe weather during the winter months.

It is a stunning environment which cannot be imagined. Sheer cliffs all around, no trees or shrubs, thousands of bluebells and pink campion creating a lilac carpet, many thousands of sea birds noisily making Skomer their chosen breeding ground as there are few predators (such as rats), huge numbers of burrows made by puffins, Manx sheerwaters and rabbits make the island’s surface feel like one could fall the whole way down to sea level if a wrong foot is placed (hence strict rules of only being able to tread on the footpaths).

I’ve known in principal, since Jane moved to Skomer, that everything they consume must be brought on to the island by hand but only by my visiting and negotiating the steep coastal path down to the boat jetty which takes day visitors and volunteers to the island and then up the very steep steps having disembarked from the boat am I able to really comprehend what this means. The milk, the sausages, the coffee we enjoyed during our visit were all carried in this way and more likely than not by the only free hand which was not carrying Martha.

Jane I’m totally awestruck by where and how you live. No wonder you felt compelled to write your book (Skomer Island by Jane Matthews). The most amazing thing is how little you’ve grumbled about the hardships to me over the past few years. I can’t imagine how cold it must have been with no heating in March nor how you can bear it when you have to get more supplies in or take bottles back to the mainland. Please grumble more from now on and I’ll try my best to never moan about my very easy life…

I’ve made a vow to myself to return again to Skomer as soon as I can as our trip there was sadly curtailed by the prediction of strong winds potentially making the boat stop running. I’ve also vowed to NEVER moan about having to carry bags of shopping up our drive way or feeling a bit chilly when the central heating oil is running a bit low.

Edie and I watched some ladybirds ‘cuddling’ last week and photographed them.

Later in the week when we found our newly flowering aquilegas were covered in aphids I suggested we go on a ladybird hunt as they are good at eating all the aphids.

We were both a little surprised to find one who did in fact start gobbling the aphids as predicted when we placed it on one of the affected plants.

Yesterday we watched yet another ladybird lay some eggs next to the back door and both kids have been looking at the cluster through a big magnifying glass to see if any of them have hatched yet.

I pointed out a few ladybird larvae wandering the pine needles of last years Christmas tree (growing happily in a pot) to Edie but I wasn’t convinced that I had my facts right as they look so unlikeadult ladybirds.

Having just read this ladybird factsheet I now know that young ladybirds are just as good at getting rid of unwanted greenfly and whitefly and so should be treated as welcome visitors in the garden.

Usually a mother ladybird would lay her eggs near to a plentiful food supply (ie. on a plant with loads of aphids on) rather than a scorching, barren, south facing brick wall.

The female we watched lay two batches and then as the last egg emerged she ate it! The children were a bit perplexed by this and kept asking me why she did it and I really didn’t have a good answer other than ‘Maybe she was very hungry and she knew it wasn’t a good egg to hatch..’

At the beginning of April I planted my ‘early’ potatoes (a variety of spud which is ready to eat early in the season) and ‘main crop’ potatoes (a different sort which is ready later in the season - and bigger? I’m not entirely sure yet) in a couple of trenches (about 20-30cm deep) next to each other at the far end of the vegetable garden.

I left plenty opf space (30 cm) between them and a bit more between the first trench and the stumpy barely alive new raspberry canes. Bealers thinks I’m mad to leave so much room but I think we’ll be surprised how big they grow and we can always plant something little beside them. My theory was that I remember that potatoes need earthing up so the newly formed potatoes don’t get exposed to the sunlight and turned green while they are growing bigger.

I got the children to help me trowel in a couple of inches of well rotted manure before we pushed the seed potatoes in firmly and were about to cover them up with soil. I noticed that on the end of one trench there was extra room by the fence for me to dig another foot or so of trench so I could get more potatoes in.

As an experiment I didn’t line the bottom of this last mini-section of trench with any manure but covered the whole happy lot (about thirty seed potatoes) up as I wanted to get the kids in for some urgent tea & bathtime (they melt or are totally loopy and uncooperative if I miss their bedtimeby half an hour or so). I watered them in with a couple of trips with the watering can.

Anyway. This evening I noticed that the spuds have sprouted this weekend (and my sweet peas have become very poorly looking but that’s not interesting right now). The earlies are some thick blueish green foliage and the main crop  have lighter green leaves sprouting through the soil - BUT NOTHING GROWING IN THE BIT WHERE THERE WAS NO MANURE ADDED TO THE TRENCH!

No wonder man discovered manure being tremendous for the crops. I’m looking forward to finding out which ones taste better An hoping its the ones grown in poo as there are so many more of them…

Wow. We had a grass snake in our garden. We watched it, photographed it, video’d it and generally marvelled at how it moved like a snake a bit but also just sunbathed a lot in front of the compost heap where we keep the children’s outdoor toys and I have a water butt.

I LOVE living in the country.

The sighting of a snake was so exciting for me that I called my mum who asked me to identify it properly (using the lovely countryside books I once found in the local skip) to make sure it wasn’t a viper/adder. It wasn’t and I now realise it was a very young snake as fully grown grass snakes can be over 100cm in length.

I’ve just read that female grass snakes often favour compost or manure heaps to lay their eggs in Autumn as the heat of the rotting pile acts as an incubator. This explains why we found it just by our compost heap but will I ever be able to use the compost if I think it might contain snakes!

I popped outside on Thursday night just to fetch something in and was surprised to see that the kids had emptied a great pile of soil onto the grass when they know this is expressly forbidden. After a moment I realised that Bealers and I had been out in the garden long after the kids had gone to bed marvelling at the birdsong, the awesome sunset over the hills etc. and there had been no pile of soil.

I tiptoed closer with my fingers crossed as I thought it might just be a real live hedgehog. It was! A big fat one who was very scared of me. I left him a saucer of milk and a few bits of cheese as I knew it was going to be a cold, frosty. clear-skied night. All of the snacks were gone in the morning.

I remembered reading recently an alarming statistic that the hedgehogs of Britain are dying out at a rate of about a fifth of the population every four years. By 2025, they will be gone. (Guardian, Jan 2006) Poor chap. I’m not sure I’m doing the right thing by feeding him but am going to use logic to work out that if I can feed up our prickly garden visitor then he/she won’t have to spend so much energy or time looking for food for any offspring they may have.

I’ve also briefed Bealers on resisting his savage instincts to burn the bonfire heap without first CHECKING that there is no hedgehog nest/home inside…

A lot of lucky kids have playhouses in the garden which are smashing but they do cost a fortune. This new structure in the garden for our kids to play in cost £40 for materials (willow ‘withy wood’, twine and weed-free membrane) plus a half-day of labour. It looks quite pretty already but it should grow leaves all over it soon and will be a lovely leafy hideaway in our garden which has no shade at all for the children on a hot sunny day.

My daughter spotted a book in the adults section of our tiny local library and asked me to borrow it. We looked at How Does Your Garden Grow?: Great Gardening for Green-Fingered Kids (Hamlyn Gardening) by Clare Matthews and Clive Nichols that evening and were really excited to see so many great but easy looking projects and ideas with step-by-step lovely photos. Things like painting a couple of old tyres and stacking them to form a pretty pot for a small tree or shrub which could also be used as a seat for a little one. I showed the ‘Build a willow dome’ project to Bealers who to my amazement said ‘Get the wood & I’ll have a go at building that’.

After dinner I searched the internet for local suppliers of willow cuttings and found that it is only sold during the winter period Nov-March due to its dormant season (it starts putting out roots and shoots in spring and needs to be planted before then). A local supplier, JPR Willow ‘Living Willow & Sculpture Supplies’ had sold out of most of the bundles of willow but were still selling bundles of 8ft rods for £30 and could deliver on Monday but as we were near them on Saturday we picked it up instead.

One day’s hard graft in the garden by Bealers but with 6 of his nearest/dearest keeping him company in the warm April sunshine on Sunday we are now the proud owners of a new playhouse that will hopefully root and grow.

With just a small touch of irony we have called it ‘Withywood House’ as it is made of ‘withy’ wood but also because the large sprawling south Bristol council estate Bealers grew up on is called Withywood (if you click on the link you’ll see just how green and leafy a place it isn’t). His mum and step-dad still live there and they were here for the weekend while he built it.

Step 1: Draw a circle with a stick and a bit of string cut to the length of the radius. Apparently the rods should be twice as long as the diameter of your hut. Ours were 8ft so thehut is approximately 4ft across.

Step 2: Dig out the turf within this circle and edge it with compost so the rods have something nice to grow into. We put the discarded turf pieces upside down on the compost pile hoping that they will rot down there instead of growing.

Step 3: Peg in a weed-free membrane.

Step 4: Make the doorway with two strong rods.

Step 5: Start poking the 6 structural rods through the membrane and into the ground so that enough of the length of them will root and has a good foundation for the dome.

Step 6: Start bending them into the middle and tying together with garden twine.

Step 7: Create a ’supporting wall’ for the top of the door.

Step 8: Start adding the ‘wall’ rods in an oversized basket-weaving fashion working them in at an angle and parallel to each other in one direction then back the other way with the rods going in the other direction.

Step 9: Tie with twine at each intersection (not photographed because we left Bealers to it while we went to a four year olds party). Apparently this step takes some time.

We listened to the local radio station to hear the long list Worcestershire schools who were unable to open due to to overnight snow & the kids were thrilled when they finally heard the name of their pre-school.

The kiddies and their Daddy wolfed down some steamy porrdige and Horlicks before making an enormous snow woman with leeky pigtails. Bealers then left for his very picturesque walk to work.

Our friend Janet popped in to see us yesterday which was lovely as we hadn’t seen her since before the Christmas holidays. As usual she passed on all manner of fabulous gardening and cooking knowledge and before long had the children outside ‘helping her’ take down a wire fence from our vegetable garden to use next door (Janet is the reason we have the veg patch as it was her very dear friend Emmie’s until she passed away last summer and Janet had gardened it for many years) and to find the box of beetroot I’ve stored in the shed so she could make some more beetroot chutney.

This visit we learnt how to chit potatoes properly. Thankfully I had opened the two enormous bags of seed potatoes and had laid them out on trays on top of the piano in the unheated front room just the night before her unexpected visit. What I didn’t know was that there is more to just plonking them out on a tray, why some varieties are called ‘earlies’ and others are ‘main crop’ and when to plant them into the ground… Janet told me everything I needed to know & here almost word-for-word is handy description from the Royal Horticultural Society:

Choosing and chitting seed potatoes

Choosing

After dry summers seed potatoes supplies may be shorter than usual. You might not be able to get the cultivars (varieties) you want if you wait too long before buying. Seed potatoes tend to be available from garden centres and from mail order suppliers from January.

Avoid using ware or eating potatoes as there is a risk that you will be planting virus-infected tubers that will give a disappointing crop. Tubers you have grown yourself are also likely to carry disease.

Certified seed sold by seed suppliers, garden centres and DIY superstores is guaranteed to be virtually free of pests and diseases.

Chitting

Once home, seed tubers are best ‘chitted’ or sprouted. Unpack and lay the tubers out in a single layer in a tray with the ‘rose’ end uppermost. This end has the most eyes or buds and sprouts will arise from these. Some suppliers offer ‘pre-chitted’ seed.

Keep the trays of tubers in a cool but frost-free place with at least moderate light, such as in an unheated room. Direct sunlight is best avoided. Sprouts will form within a few weeks. The tuber is therefore ready to grow away as soon as planted. Tubers can be laid out to chit from January onwards, but planting should be delayed until March in sheltered and southern areas or April in less favoured districts. Earlier plantings can rot in the ground or the shoots can be frosted off on sharp nights. By this time the sprouts should be about 5cm (2in) long and dark coloured. Longer thinner sprouts are caused by excess heat or too little light or both, and tiny sprouts suggest conditions are too cold. Chitting takes about six weeks.

If the weather is unsuitable for planting, tubers can be left to chit further, even into May, without too much loss of crop.