A Country Diary 76
WE CAME HOME the other day to find that Milly the cat had brought home a little wild bunny. Presumably she intended to kill it and eat, but when we arrived, she was doing a bit of laid back torturing and tormenting prior to moving in for the kill. The bunny was perfectly alive. It was about eight inches long and a sort of grey colour. At first we speculated that it might be the offspring of Blossom. Blossom has gone half wild. We saw her sitting under the gate, being courted by a wild rabbit, who scarpered when I approached. We have seen her disappearing down a rabbit hole near the vegetable patch, presumably to spend some time with this boyfriend. I have also noticed a lot of evidence of nibbling in the vegetable patch: radish seedlings have lost their leaves overnight.
Well, whether or not this rabbit was the progeny of Blossom and Wild Jack Rabbit, we decided to keep her. We put her on the table whereupon she ran along it and flew off the end, I suppose never having encountered a table before. We held her and she seemed to enjoy being stroked, although her poor little heart was beating at a furious pace. We put him in a basket with some water, hay and leaves and put it next to Delilah’s bed. Delilah called her Thomasina Nibbles Hodgkinson. We warned the children that the bunny may not be weaned and therefore could die overnight without its mother’s milk. But in the morning, Nibbles was still alive. Yes, we said. You can take her to school.
But then, tragedy struck. In a moment of neglectful parenting, we left Henry alone with the bunny. Ten minutes later, Delilah brought a very limp and floppy rabbit to see me. “Her head’s gone floppy,” she said. A frank and full investigation led to the following conclusion: Henry had repeatedly thrown Nibbles high into the ait and let her land on the sofa. We guessed that it was during this treatment that her neck broke. Henry got a stern telling off, and while the kids were at school I composed the follwing epitaph for Nibbles’ grave:
Here lies Thomasina Nibbles Hodgkinson. Rabbit. Brought in by Milly on 10 May 2008. Killed by Henry, 11 May 2008. RIP.
I AM CURRENTLY enthused about the vegetable garden. After suffering repeated attacks from the pony, and from the hens, I decided it was time to spend a little money on fortifying the area. From the start I have tried to keep the vegetable garden spend down to as near nought pounds as possible, and apart from the cost of seeds, have managed quite well. But to lose all one’s hard work as a result of inadequate protection is very frustrating. The general aesthetics of the place were woeful, too: barbed wire and broken gates, nettles in the borders. So I asked my friend Alan to come and help and advise. We bought fourteen fifteen foot rails and a few fence posts. Between each existing fence post we put in a new one. I took down all the barbed wire. We sawed the nails to length and nailed them up, and stapled in chicken wire all around the fence. It now looks a thousand times better, and I have started to tidy up the paths and the beds.
I now proudly present the following list of what is growing right now:
Peas: the variety is Alderman. I have sowed three times: the first sowing was completely lost, I know now to what. Now there are three short rows sprouting, with two more to be sown. You can’t have enough peas. I have put up pea sticks in the form of old beech twigs and bamboo pole bits, plus some spikey hawthorn branches. I’m planning on trying out another method, where you hang pieces of string down for a frame. The peas cleverly grip on to the sring as they climb.
Squashes: I sowed ten courgettes and other squashes on the windowsill and have so far planted out four. Three are protected by cloches: an old see-through plastic box with a stone on top and two scruffy old plastic bell cloches. The fourth has a protective ring of salt and broken egg shells around it. It has a pleasingly magical appearance. This is my plan: to mix up a big load of slat and egg shell and keep it i a sack on the veg patch, for constant use to deter the slugs.
Climbing French Beans. The variety is called blauhilde, and they did very well last year. This year I grew twelve in pots on the kitchen windowsill. I put in a row of willow poles recently cut down from the willow tree, and planted two plants at the base of each. I also sowed two further seeds into the ground by each pole. Then I put up some kitchen wire all a round the bottom to deter animals. I’m pleased to say that so far so good: the sown seeds are germinating and the planted plants are starting to curl anti-clockwise around the willow poles. And it looks rather charming in a Permaculture sort of way. Most pleasing.
Potatoes: I forget the variety but they are first earlies, and most now have sprouted. I’ve also noticed a few others potato plants sprouting, from last year’s Duke of York tubers which must have been left in the ground. So I am attemting to transplant these into the gaps in the main potato bed, but whether that will work or not I don’t know. All in all there must be around fifty to sixty potato plants.
Garlic: this is shooting up. I don’t know why I haven’t gone big on garlic before. It’s very easy indeed. And is supposed to deter slugs.
Lettuces: I sowed a load of Buttercrunch directly into the soil between tow rows of peas. So far they ar growing beautfully, although there are far too many so I will have to throw away or eat the little ones and leave just four or five to grow up. I have cut an old piece of chicken wire and bent it into a triangle shape to protect them. The same is true, by the way, of the peas. I also sowed a seed tray of lettuces, and have now potted on about a dozen, which I will have to find space for somewhere at some point.
Kale: I sowed a load of kale into a seed tray on the windowsill. I have now transferred fourteen of the seedlings to bigger pots and they are sitting on a table in the sun in the fornt garden. The idea here is to transplant them eventually and create a good kale patch for winter greens.
Turnips: They are growing well. I thin them every ow ands then. They were sown by sprinkling rather than neatly in rows and the effect is wilder but I think good.
Parsnips: I planted some parsnip seedlings and they are doing fine.
Chard: A few of the chard plants are growing back, but do we actually like the taste? Not much. I may replace them with spinach and lettuces.
Marigolds: I sowed twleve marigold seeds on the windowsill, and the little seedlings are now sitting in the front garden. My plan is to grow them up a bit and then plant a couple in each raised bed, in the fashion of the French grape farmers who plant marigolds at the end of each row of vines.
Rocket: I have sowed patches of Wild Grazia and Suzette in various pots and corners of the front garden. “You can never have too much rocket,” we have decided.
Parsley: I sowed a patch of parsley on one of the reaised beds and the seeds all seem to have germinated and are growing steadily. It would be nice to have a large patch rather than the two or three feeble specimens I grew last year.
Tomatos, beetroot and carrots: I’m not bothering with any of these this year. The tomatoes in particular were a huge disappointment last year. I can imagine buying a few plants and just letting them trail aroundf the garden in beds, but never that awful busienss with the pots again. All that work for a handful of mediocre tomatoes – no thanks.
Leeks: I sowed them in a seed tray and now I don’t know what to do with them. I think I did this wrong. Must call Alan.
Sweet peas: I sowed them in a circle around the tree stump on the front lawn, but nothing has happened.
Nasturtiums: There are quite a few self-seeded nasturtiums springing up both in the fron garden and in the vegetable patch. I also bought a packet of nasturtium seeds, and on neighbour Caroline’s advice, placed them in the cracks of the dry stone wall in front of the house. This year I will collect the seeds in a brown envelope, as the nursery man advised me when I bought the seeds. “Save yourself a pound!” he remarked. I think nasturtiums are wonderful: they grow anywhere, the flowers are beautiful, they don’t get slugged, you can eat them and it’s easy to collect the seeds. What’s not to like, as they say?
In the veg patch, I have also taken up all the old black plastic that I’d put underneath the paths as a weed preventor. Little bits of plastic emerged here and there and flapped around, making the palce look awful. On top of the black plastic, the wood chips which I put down a few years ago had turned into soil from which sprang grass and weeds. Now I have removed all that, peeling off wedges of turf like a carpet, and flinging them upside down into the border, because I read somewhere that they will turn inot compost if you do that. Now we are down to weedless mud paths, fine now in the dry, but I suspect which will get muddy and sprout weeds. So my plan is to put down strips of old carpet, then cover that with stones and sand. Then we will have elegant stone paths. I have also started building a cold frame out of bits of wood lying around. I have also acquired a load of sheets of glass from our neighbour’s barn, and intend to make frames out of them somehow or other, maybe using the old glassless windows that are lying around.
So thanks to Alan and the good weather, the vegetable garden is delighting me again.
ALAN HAS also provided some good thoughts on our hen situation. As you know, not a single one of the thirteen chickens appeared to be laying eggs. Now, I had seen a rat quite frequently in the hen house: each time I poked my head in, he would scuttle away. It was like a scene from Babe: at one stage, Blossom the white bunny was living in there. I would open the door, and the bunny, the rat and the hens would hurriedly scurry away from the middle of the barn, where it looked as if they had been holding some sort of animals’ council. Well, one day I found this rat in the fed bin, stuck and sqeaking piteously as he tried to jump up the plastic sides of the bin, and instead of shooting it as I should have, I got the cat and let the rat out. It disappeared through a hole in the wall while the cat looked on. Now, this clever rat, said Alan, may be the cause of our problems. He and his mates are probably stealing the eggs as soon as they are laid. We’ve been providing him with a no-effort food source. Now, that day, thanks to this insight, I policed the henhouse, visitng every half hour. Each time ratty scuttled away, and at around noon I found two eggs. Alan also drew out attention to another nest: Delilah had seen a hen in the hedge. “It’s stuck,” she said. It ran away when the kids approached. “Could be a nest,” said Alan, and a nest it was: I hpsuhed the brambles aside and found a fresh egg sitting there, and the shells of old ones. Alan advised to discourage the hen from returning to the nest by taking the eggs and messing it up. So now we had a total of three eggs, directly attributable to a new level of understanding. Arthur has put them in a box and marked it “Town Farm Eggs, Free Range, Arthur Aged 8, we hope you enjoy our eggs.” Clearly he has an insticnt for marketing. He has also put the price up: doubled it, in fact, from last year’s 60p for six to £1.20. If quizzed, I suppose we could blame the credit crunch, or even rising fuel costs. Although we have no fuel costs. We just use our legs. Maybe we should reduce the price slightly. £1 per box? This morning I put a cat in the henhouse to deter the rats, and we are going to keep them locked in there until one o’clock, to encourage them to lay in the right place and not the hedges. Yes, we will not give up! We will never surrender!
ENDS
"The answer to how to live is to stop thinking about it. And just to live. But you're doing that anyway. However you intellectualise it, you still just live."