Some time ago, we redesigned our back garden. Out went the shrubbery and in came the pond, the hedgehog mound, and what we fondly hoped would be a meadow but is now more honestly referred to as the Wild Area. Basically, we just don’t cut an area of the lawn until September in the hope that bugs and butterflies will thrive. In fact, all the changes were made with the intention of making our garden more ‘wildlife friendly’. And it’s really really worked, despite our marauding cats, of which more below.
So now we have lots of animals who use our garden, some who live with us, and some who just potter by from time to time and happily don’t seem to be aware of such human concepts as borders and boundaries.
Since we have made these changes, we seem to attract many more wild birds to our garden. We keep them well-fed and they amply reward us with colour, variety and displays. I have whiled away gentle hours watching them.
For the most part, they are common, but beautiful; greenfinches, sparrows, blackbirds, the occasional thrush... The most unusual visitor we have ever had was the linnet we saw last year, but other notable moments include the recent swoop and landing of a kite in the back garden (it actually landed! That was a first!), a sparrow hawk taking out a sparrow in mid-flight, a grey heron fishing in the pond and my absolute favourite, a resident flock of starlings. It’s far from being a murmuration, sadly, but nevertheless, a small flock of about 20 birds regularly comes to knock hell out of our garden worms. We also hear owls and buzzards and for the first time last week we saw a little owl in our neighbour’s garden – let’s hope they all come and visit.
Back to the cats, who arrived by invitation and remain by somewhat stretched tolerance. Not least since one of them leapt, four paws off the ground, to snatch a goldfinch from the bird feeder last month.
Springtime, with all the baby field mammals being born is the worst: often our greedy felines bring mice inside to eat them in peace and quiet, leaving the guts as glistening deposits wherever they fall. Often, though, and despite their highly honed hunting skills, our cats prove too stupid to hang on to the small creatures long enough to kill them, and the victim makes a break for freedom and I end up chasing a mouse around the house with a fishing net (yes, my dear neighbours, that’s what you see me doing. We are not re-enacting Chitty Chitty Bang Bang here, with me taking the role of the Child Catcher!)
Our cats also specialise in decapitating baby rabbits. If I find headless corpses in the garden, frankly that’s not too bad as I find a faceless ex-bunny easier to deal with than one looking sweet and cuddly, but dead. However, on one memorable occasion my nose detected a vintage corpse which had been snuck inside some time ago and left in a little-used drawer under the bed. Too old to stew, too smelly to ignore, I donned rubber gloves and cleaned it up. Probably finding decomposing animals under one’s bed is not something that I should be sharing this widely but too late now and hopefully my friends will not desert me.
What else? Well, spawning frogs and toads have given my kids a series of biology lessons that they’ll never get at school (do you know they can even ‘do it’ when they swim? Goodness knows how the ladies stay afloat - I wouldn’t be able to. But what an impressive example of female multi-tasking!) We also have newts, dragonflies, damselflies, pond skaters and probably a whole host of creepies that we are too ignorant to recognise.
A path across our grass travelling from under one fence, across the garden and out the other side, so often used that we can even see it through snow, marks the fox’s route. I rather like foxes, except when they howl in the dead of night or make out noisily in our rhubarb patch during mating season.
But my top-of-the-list all-time favourites are the bats. We have at least five who swoop and flutter in the half light of evening as we sit in the garden, mesmerised, trying to make out a solid animal from the frenzied balls of movement as they pass. They’ve just re-appeared, so it must be Spring. Just don’t tell the cats.
Thursday 3 April 2014
One Can Trust - our local food bank
Earlier this year, my kids received a late Christmas present of £10 each. Rather than give them licence to cruise the local shops, though, this was money with a string attached: they had to pass it on to somebody who needed it more than they did.
After some discussion, they decided to shop for a food bank. Food banks are springing up across Buckinghamshire as in the rest of the UK; I know of banks in Chesham and Rickmansworth and there are, I understand, talks of a bank in Chalfont St Peter. We found a local organisation, the One Can Trust, established that their collection point is just the other side of Beaconsfield, and went shopping to a local supermarket.
The charity gives out lists of what it needs, and this does not include fresh food, so immediately our shopping experience was different from usual as we headed for the aisles of tins. The children had to buy to a budget, and kept a running total of what they put in the trolley.
My daughter alighted on large cans of potatoes for 14p, and collected an armful. Her strategy was clear: pile it high, get as much as you can for your money - more food feeds more people. My son’s reaction was a little more complex. Whilst he completely got the ‘quantity’ argument, he was uncomfortable that cost was the overriding consideration. ‘I know I’ve only got £10’, he said, ‘but why can’t they have nice food too?’ A tricky one, hard to resolve. Making up rules on the hoof that actually bear scrutiny is part of being a parent, so we decided that the quality couldn’t fall below certain standards; for example, no items full of additives, and we were also really hesitant about cheap meat products that might be bulked out by donkeys’ toe nails, or something equally unspeakable. I guess that the bottom line was if we wouldn’t eat it ourselves, we wouldn’t buy it for anyone else.
We learnt a lot of lessons that day, not least how hard it is to buy frugally, yet nourishingly. I have to admit that I have not, since far-off student days, had to eke out a small sum of money to feed a person healthily and cheaply and the experience was timely and humbling. And as we did the task, and delivered our little boxes to the drop off point, we couldn’t but...not walk in the shoes of people who are in such need, but think a lot about them, and the disparity in the fortunes of our local population.
People in communities all have different needs and most of us try to support each other in a variety of ways. That we live amongst people who are struggling to feed their families is a relatively new departure which hopefully will be treated with the same community spirit.
After some discussion, they decided to shop for a food bank. Food banks are springing up across Buckinghamshire as in the rest of the UK; I know of banks in Chesham and Rickmansworth and there are, I understand, talks of a bank in Chalfont St Peter. We found a local organisation, the One Can Trust, established that their collection point is just the other side of Beaconsfield, and went shopping to a local supermarket.
The charity gives out lists of what it needs, and this does not include fresh food, so immediately our shopping experience was different from usual as we headed for the aisles of tins. The children had to buy to a budget, and kept a running total of what they put in the trolley.
My daughter alighted on large cans of potatoes for 14p, and collected an armful. Her strategy was clear: pile it high, get as much as you can for your money - more food feeds more people. My son’s reaction was a little more complex. Whilst he completely got the ‘quantity’ argument, he was uncomfortable that cost was the overriding consideration. ‘I know I’ve only got £10’, he said, ‘but why can’t they have nice food too?’ A tricky one, hard to resolve. Making up rules on the hoof that actually bear scrutiny is part of being a parent, so we decided that the quality couldn’t fall below certain standards; for example, no items full of additives, and we were also really hesitant about cheap meat products that might be bulked out by donkeys’ toe nails, or something equally unspeakable. I guess that the bottom line was if we wouldn’t eat it ourselves, we wouldn’t buy it for anyone else.
We learnt a lot of lessons that day, not least how hard it is to buy frugally, yet nourishingly. I have to admit that I have not, since far-off student days, had to eke out a small sum of money to feed a person healthily and cheaply and the experience was timely and humbling. And as we did the task, and delivered our little boxes to the drop off point, we couldn’t but...not walk in the shoes of people who are in such need, but think a lot about them, and the disparity in the fortunes of our local population.
People in communities all have different needs and most of us try to support each other in a variety of ways. That we live amongst people who are struggling to feed their families is a relatively new departure which hopefully will be treated with the same community spirit.
Living with - or relying on - the weather. (written summer 2013)
Ho, hum, the weather, eh? Can’t live with it – can’t live without it. Last year, I had an almost total crop failure. I don’t count slugs as a crop and they were the only thing prospering in my garden, the merchant bankers of my veg patch, growing fat and smarmy at the cost of everything else. The only unexpected saving grace was that I had a bumper, late crop of tomatoes – by November the vines were sagging, weighed down with huge quantities of very green tomatoes which I harvested, put in brown paper bags to ripen and then feasted off as they reddened throughout the winter. Oh, I loved the pretention of serving luscious scarlet tomato salad to friends in January saying – ‘help yourselves – they’re from our garden, you know’. ‘No!’ ‘Oh yes!’
Things aren’t a whole lot better this year. Everything’s late, but at least it’s not so wet (and by the time you read this, we may well be deep into an August drought). But it’s ok. It’s not a matter of life or death; if my harvests fail, I’ll pop to the supermarket or see what local farmers have managed to drag up through the soil.
But. What if the timing of the seasons really matters to you? What if my family was relying on what I could grow in my garden? What is happening in other areas of the world where the increasing unpredictability of weather is making subsistence farming increasingly fraught?
As an Oxfam report on Tajikistan sets out, climate change ‘is affecting agriculture... and threatening the food security of thousands of people who depend on small-scale subsistence farming for their survival. Intense droughts, extensive flooding and increased frequency of weather-related shocks are becoming more apparent, and hitting poor people hardest’.
So when the birds get into my strawberries, or I’m complaining about my wrinkled beetroots, paucity of cucumbers and brussel sprouts that promise much but deliver little– I’ll try to put my lot in that context.
Things aren’t a whole lot better this year. Everything’s late, but at least it’s not so wet (and by the time you read this, we may well be deep into an August drought). But it’s ok. It’s not a matter of life or death; if my harvests fail, I’ll pop to the supermarket or see what local farmers have managed to drag up through the soil.
But. What if the timing of the seasons really matters to you? What if my family was relying on what I could grow in my garden? What is happening in other areas of the world where the increasing unpredictability of weather is making subsistence farming increasingly fraught?
As an Oxfam report on Tajikistan sets out, climate change ‘is affecting agriculture... and threatening the food security of thousands of people who depend on small-scale subsistence farming for their survival. Intense droughts, extensive flooding and increased frequency of weather-related shocks are becoming more apparent, and hitting poor people hardest’.
So when the birds get into my strawberries, or I’m complaining about my wrinkled beetroots, paucity of cucumbers and brussel sprouts that promise much but deliver little– I’ll try to put my lot in that context.
How to get a gardener and not a cowboy.....(written January 2014)
At the top of the year when it is cold and miserable, everyone looks longingly for the first signs of Spring and newspapers are full of columns about gardening: what to do to attract wildlife, how to decide on which seedlings to plant and more than anything, when to get started.
Sometimes, though, life gets in the way and you start a bit late, or it begins to feel like a chore. You definitely could plant your potatoes out once the bed has been weeded, but when are you going to get around to digging? Or you would like a pond but don’t have the knowhow...and so your ears start to prick up when someone talks in glowing terms about their gardener.
Before you make that ‘phone call, here is my list of how to get a gardener and avoid a cowboy. Believe me, I’ve learnt from painful experience.
1. Try to get several recommendations for a gardener, not just one.
2. If someone is happy to recommend, then don’t just to discuss the positives. Consider asking ‘apart from the things that you were obviously happy about, is there anything at all that you didn’t like?’ This question teases out issues that you need to know.
3. Establish whether your gardener is an unskilled labourer or has any specific training. If your gardener asserts he or she has certain qualifications or has won prizes, get proof.
4. Agree what work is going to be done, for how much and roughly how long it will take. Don’t leave a project to ‘evolve’ and don’t expect to have the same priorities or perspective as your gardener. Put a list or a drawing together so that misunderstandings are avoided.
5. If you are quoted a daily rate, check what hours your gardener intends to work. A person who works from 9.30 to 3.30 with an hour for lunch is far more expensive than someone who works 8am through 4pm.
6. If your gardener might borrow your tools, mark them clearly. It’s hard to work out later which muddy spade is yours.
7. Never pay in advance.
8. Make it clear that you will always ask for receipts for money spent on your behalf.
9. Once a project has been started, don’t feel trapped into carrying on with the same person; it will only be harder to sort out later. If you’re having second thoughts, shop around and see if you can find someone better.
10. Don’t assume that just because your gardener works outside, he or she is skilled at other things such as fencing, building walls or laying a path. You might just end up with an expensive disappointment.
Above all, stay in control! It’s your garden, you are going to live with the results, and it should be a source of happiness and not regret for missed chances.
Sometimes, though, life gets in the way and you start a bit late, or it begins to feel like a chore. You definitely could plant your potatoes out once the bed has been weeded, but when are you going to get around to digging? Or you would like a pond but don’t have the knowhow...and so your ears start to prick up when someone talks in glowing terms about their gardener.
Before you make that ‘phone call, here is my list of how to get a gardener and avoid a cowboy. Believe me, I’ve learnt from painful experience.
1. Try to get several recommendations for a gardener, not just one.
2. If someone is happy to recommend, then don’t just to discuss the positives. Consider asking ‘apart from the things that you were obviously happy about, is there anything at all that you didn’t like?’ This question teases out issues that you need to know.
3. Establish whether your gardener is an unskilled labourer or has any specific training. If your gardener asserts he or she has certain qualifications or has won prizes, get proof.
4. Agree what work is going to be done, for how much and roughly how long it will take. Don’t leave a project to ‘evolve’ and don’t expect to have the same priorities or perspective as your gardener. Put a list or a drawing together so that misunderstandings are avoided.
5. If you are quoted a daily rate, check what hours your gardener intends to work. A person who works from 9.30 to 3.30 with an hour for lunch is far more expensive than someone who works 8am through 4pm.
6. If your gardener might borrow your tools, mark them clearly. It’s hard to work out later which muddy spade is yours.
7. Never pay in advance.
8. Make it clear that you will always ask for receipts for money spent on your behalf.
9. Once a project has been started, don’t feel trapped into carrying on with the same person; it will only be harder to sort out later. If you’re having second thoughts, shop around and see if you can find someone better.
10. Don’t assume that just because your gardener works outside, he or she is skilled at other things such as fencing, building walls or laying a path. You might just end up with an expensive disappointment.
Above all, stay in control! It’s your garden, you are going to live with the results, and it should be a source of happiness and not regret for missed chances.
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