Wanton Vandalism

It can be slightly disheartening when you've spent several hours (and pounds) on a project, only for it to be vandalised in the dead of night. I thought that moving to the countryside would get me away from such wanton destruction.
But fear not. One of the perpetrators has been caught on camera and summarily dispatched!

A while ago, Sue planted up a couple of dozen young fir trees for me. Every year a local nursery flogs them off for a pound each after Christmas. And that was that... or so I thought.
Next time I passed the garden centre I popped in to see if they had any more and came away with another dozen. My plan was to grow them on the east side of the chicken pen. It's not often the wind comes from this direction, but when it does you generally know about it as it bites into your skin.

Anyway, the operation was going very well until I decided to go and inspect those which Sue had planted. It took me a while to locate them, which seemed a little strange until I started finding small sticks poking out of the ground with pine needles attached. Something had taken to nibbling off the young branches! There they were, just discarded on the ground. I instantly knew the culprit - rabbits! I set about scavenging tree guards from around the garden. As a temporary measure anything would do.

Two days later, I inspected the saplings which I had planted and several of them had lower branchlets nibbled off too. I hastily erected a makeshift fence and quickly got on the internet to order a roll of treeguard mesh.

Temporary protection hastily erected.

This mesh comes on a roll.
Conifers need the open mesh.

And so last week my main tasks were interrupted as I set about protecting my young trees. It doesn't look so pretty now, but give it a few years...



Mesh guards and animal feed bags underneath to act as a mulch.

Back to the perpetrators. Here's the one I caught on camera. But there are more out there, and this is (was) just a baby.

No escape!

Woodcock a gogo

Goodness there's been a lot happening on the farm this past week. Warm weather and nights drawing out mean there's no excuse for staying indoors.
A couple of years ago I planted a whole load of conifers and firs down the land, intended as a partial windbreak and as a point of interest halfway down the land. But it didn't quite work out. The difficulty keeping the grass short has meant that the trees got lost and struggled to grow. Added to this, some of them really didn't like the exposed situation and succumbed to the winds. The soil down there is compacted and heavy too, the result of years of agricultural exploitation in the past.

The geese peruse the new planting scheme.

So I decided to take the risk and move the lot of them closer to the farmhouse where they could have more impact. I'm also acutely aware that I may at some stage lose the ash trees, so replacements need to be ready to go. Apart from willows and conifers, I'd be long gone waiting for any other tree to approach the maturity of the old ash trees.

As I trudged through the rough grass, spade in hand, what should fly out but a woodcock - a dumpy bird with a long, straight bill and almost perfect camouflage. In fact, the first one I ever saw caused me quite a shock as I almost stood on it sitting motionless in the leaf litter.
This is only my second woodcock sighting for the farm and came as quite a surprise. I guess it's a migrating bird on it's way back north, like the redwings which are feeding up on the ivy before their flight to their breeding grounds.

Back to the tree moving.
It was an easier job than I'd anticipated, mainly due to their root systems not being very extensive. As long as the rabbits don't destroy them, the evergreens should hopefully soon begin to give more year-round structure and height to the garden.
I mention the rabbits as today I discovered that the twenty four young Christmas trees which Sue planted along the dyke, with the hope that they would eventually form a windbreak, have been wantonly and destructively nibbled! It was enough to divert me from all other tasks to quickly improvise some tree protectors for them. It can be disheartening when something like this happens. Time to call in the rabbit hunter!

The Great Escape.

Thursday 24th May 2012
The sun tries to break through on a misty May morning.

No wonder some of the eggs are getting cracked - why do they all have to try to get in the same nest box?

Meanwhile, just look how big the teenagers have got!

The animals get through a lot more water in this weather and for the first time this year I had to use the hosepipe (it is allowed for this!) as most of the collected water has been used up. Trouble with a hosepipe is that piglets just can not resist playing with it!


As the temperature climbed into the 70's and the sun beat down, the piglets made their first ever wallow.

The return of Mr Mow-tivator
At 11:30 today this arrived back...Mr Mow-tivator.

By 8:30 this evening, I'd achieved this...

Perfect pathways in the potager

One hundred trees mulched with the accumulated clippings of the day - a convenient way to dispose of a mountain of grass cuttings, and a friendly way of protecting the saplings from weed competition without using nasty chemicals.

The Great Escape.

One more job before I could put my feet up and relax. The nightly round up of G'nea G'nea. Sue was at her community choir tonight, so the job was infinitely more tricky.

But not as big a problem as what was still to come, for I heard the familiar click-squeal sequence of a piglet encountering an electric fence. Problem was, all my piglets were kept in with wooden fence and stock fence. Only Daisy was hemmed in by an invisible force field ... until now.

Two of the piglets were in with her, and three more were outside all the fencing!! Thank goodness all that was on their minds was getting back in with their brothers and sisters or their mum. Two braved pushing under the electric fence to reach the safety of mum, but not before they got a bit of a shock! The last one, I showed through the secret gate at the back of the pig pen. I had been thinking about reuniting the piglets with Daisy, but not before I'd strimmed the grass and lowered the electric fence. Oh well. In the fading light I took down the partition and allowed the last two piglets through. Daisy was very excited to see them all, though I think she's forgotten that she had ten before. Let's hope they're all still there in the morning.

Progress in the Copse



Wednesday 2nd May 2012
Another dull start to the day.

Every single tree I planted courtesy of Lincolnshire's Hedgerow and Small Woodlands Grant has survived. Peering down into those plastic tubes a variety of fresh green leaves peer back up. Some have even made it into the fresh air above the confines of their tubular home. So the plastic tubes, which cost about five times as much as the trees themselves, have done their job so far in protecting the young saplings from the ravages of the hares and the worst of the weather.

But there is one more threat. Believe it or not, the grass growing around them could kill them, competing for the soils resources but also emitting growth stunting chemicals. At the very least, it will seriously inhibit their growth. I could spray round the base of each tree, but this does not sit at all comfortably with my beliefs.
So instead, I will need to keep the area around each tree well mulched, excluding light and so excluding grass. My plan was to make good use of the grass mowings, but so far it's been too wet to try and collect them. I'm also using every paper feed bag or cardboard box which comes my way. Ugly, but they'll do the job, they'll rot down harmlessly and they can be covered with mulch when I get the chance.

A gentle stroll through the woods  listening to the dawn chorus is just a few years away!

Return of The Gurgle Monster



Wednesday 18th April 2012



Tuesday 17th April 2012





 



Friday 20th April 2012

Thursday 19th April 2012

On 5th April a hosepipe ban came into place.

Since then I've been unable to till the land to sow seeds.

Why? Because the ground is rock hard, set like concrete? Because it's too difficult to transport water to the seeds?

No! It's been too wet! Every single day it has rained. Water butts overfloweth. Even the bath which sits down near the chicken enclosure has filled up - that's about a foot of rain then.

For the first time, I've had to hunt slugs in the veg beds. In fact, this is the first time since we moved in that I've not been worried about watering the garden.

To be fair, before the April showers I had been worrying about the freshly sown broad beans and peas just sitting in dry soil.



So, with seed sowing put off for another week, what was I to do with my spare morning today?

How about dealing with this carnage...



Every time I go down into the meadow at the moment I am flushing hares, sometimes from right under my feet. Up till now they have only taken the very occasional nibble from the pines I have planted, but one of them has obviously developed gourmet tastes. So I gathered together what few stakes I had left, a pile of old bamboos, a roll of tree protection, hammer, staples and twine, and headed down into the meadow.



For the first time in a long time the ground actually squelched under my feet. As I drove in the stakes, I could hear the meadow's stomach rumbling below.

The Gurgle Monster has returned!

The strange gloopy, spongy noises which echo and ripple through the fenland soil as the water is sucked down below and into the dyke system. I have no idea why this happens, but it is a disconcerting experience when every footstep seems to send ripples out through the soil causing burbling, babbling and bubbling. Even more eerie when, alone in the middle of a field away from any other human, the ground starts to talk to you!