Rabbits

Oh dear! What to do about them? First they ate all my newly planted french beans, leaving little stubby bare stalks sticking up.

 Next they gained entrance to the fruit cage, which as well as being home to fruit, is also the chosen place for various veg. and demolished three rows of beetroot. Then we had mysterious activity in the poly-tunnel. 
Now the poly-tunnel is where I am growing tomatoes, cucumbers, climbing beans, carrots, basil and various salads and where I imagined my plants were safe from the depredations of nature. Then I noticed a large-ish hole in one corner of the plastic close to the ground and thought we had somehow caught it with some garden tools or machinery. Then the diggings appeared: obvious upheavals of the soil underneath the tomatoes, but no sign of a hole. Was it moles? Was it rats? It didn't seem quite like the work of either. We mended the hole with gaffer tape only to find the next morning, the gaffer tape chewed away. So again we mended it, really well this time. Again it was chewed away. We were mystified.
The strange thing was, there was no sign of any damage to the vegetables and no sign of a rabbit hole, so rabbits were not suspected.
Then, one morning - a baby bunny was found sitting outside the poly-tunnel door! On seeing me it fled into the tunnel and I caught it hiding under the cucumbers. We shall draw a veil over what happened next, but Kanto enjoyed rabbit for breakfast.
Then we saw them! The holes! Two unmistakeable rabbit hole that had definitely not been there before, had appeared under the tomato plants. This was followed by more baby bunny appearances, but this time the poor little things were definitely not well and soon expired.

So, I did a little research. Evidently rabbit mothers, when making their maternity burrow, will hide the entrance by kicking back the excavated dirt. This rabbit had chosen my poly-tunnel as the perfect place to bring her babies into the world and had chewed her way in. She had given birth down the hole then gone out in the evening to feed. On returning home she found her way barred by gaffer tape
and, frantic to get back to her babies had chewed through the tape - twice!
The holes had only appeared once the babies were big enough to emerge into the world.
Why they were ill I do not know, but I must plead guilty to poking the hose down the hole and trying to evict any residents with a deluge of water: after all, it was them or me! But with no result. So it might have been delayed drowning effects. Brutal I know , but nature is red in tooth and claw after all. As there are other healthy rabbits around, it can't have been the awful myxomatosis. 
The odd thing was that not a leaf of any of my poly-tunnel plants had been nibbled. It's almost as if they knew that they should not cause trouble on their home pitch or they might be noticed. 
If you are appalled by all of this, reflect on what you might have done, having spent a load of money on a poly-tunnel and a whole year of effort preparing the soil and growing your plants, only to find yourself within a whisker of losing the lot!
Anyway, they have gone and I am wiser and more admiring of the native skills of rabbits!

Rock Cottage Birds

Sometimes I think that Rock Cottage has become the centre for local birds. All winter we have been feeding numbers of many species and even now that they are busy raising their young, they still come back to feed, often bringing their offspring. We have had a brood of six great tits squabbling just like any human siblings, over the peanut feeder and we have finches of all stripes and non, including bull finches, nesting around the garden. Wrens are nesting in the woodshed literally alongside their neighbours the swallows.

The downside to all this is that we also have a resident family of magpies. I am sure they have taken many fledglings but surely it has always been so and many more survive. Our swallows are on their second brood as are several other residents. 

The ravens have bred successfully in the wood and there are buzzards and their young close by, these two uneasy neighbours are often to be seen in aerial disagreement. We have at least one hobby and one sparrow-hawk that feed on 'our' birds. We refuse to be dismayed by this. One cannot pick and choose which bits of nature one approves of and condemn the rest. All nature is one.

Amazing Swallows

I have often marvelled at the skill and speed with which swallows will manoeuvre in and out of narrow holes in buildings to get to their nests. Today there was a swallow event which made me gasp! I was sitting having breakfast in the kitchen. Because of the heat, both the Velux roof lights and the french window were open. When swiftly and almost silently, a swallow curved through the Velux, across the kitchen and out of the french window, passing right in front of me as I ate my toast. I think I was more surprised than the bird, which performed this feat as if it had done it a hundred times. The coolness of perfection! Something to remember. 

Too tame for its own good?

We have an exceedingly tame male blackbird that has almost no fear either of us or of our big dog. Fortunately Kanto has decided long ago that birds are not worth the effort and he and the birds, including our hens, ignore one-another. Cats are another thing! Well worth the chase in Kanto's estimation and for this reason, our neighbouring cats do not visit Rock Cottage. But this blackbird is so totally without any alarm mechanism ,we wonder if his days are numbered. It is not the first year that we have had such a blackbird around the cottage, so this is either the same one or it is the same genetic trait appearing in its offspring. Either way implies survivability. We shall see!

July 2013

I'm back! After a prolonged absence during which I have been very busy. Now still busy but I've decided to make time for the blog. Twitter is a different animal and serves a different purpose and there is definitely a place in this life for the blog.

Flowers, flowers, flowers!

Life in lovely Herefordshire is as good as ever. The flowers this summer are amazing! I suspect that if one kept a record, one would find a certain pattern in the weather over two or three years that leads to this abundance of bloom. It began with the daffodils and then the apple blossom, which bodes well for the apple crop. Then the fields were butter yellow with aptly named buttercups, from hedge to hedge, giving new meaning to 'The Golden Valley': it truly was! Now it is the elders and everything in the garden. It is just stuffed with flowers!

The Wonder of Elderflowers

These amazingly fragrant and ethereal blossoms are adorning our waysides in great billows. The elder is regarded as a weed tree, popping up everywhere where other more refined species would struggle and its smell is rank. Its pithy wood is, if I am not mistaken, quite without practical use by humans but its blossoms are another thing.

Like great saucers of cream they hang and when examined prove to be composed of many tiny starry flowers.

Cordial

Pick them leaving behind as much stalk as possible and soak them for five days in boiled water with lemons, sugar and citric acid. Strain and bottle the resulting gorgeousness and either freeze or pasteurise, when it will keep indefinitely. If you decide to freeze it, don't do what I did last year and use ordinary or Kilner bottles. They can't take the expanding contents as it freezes and the result is shards of broken glass and a mess in the bottom of the freezer. Pasteurising is so much better and I used the pasteuriser from Vigo, which has many other uses apart from making elderflower cordial.The result for me is six 75cl bottles of delectable elderflower cordial, which should see us through the summer.