The Midnight Hour
The late John Cushnie was once asked, “What is the best way to introduce wild life into the garden?” His reply still makes me smile: ”Plant out and water in your strip of bedding-plants or lettuce, retreat to the kitchen window and just wait for all manner of wild life to show up and devour your precious plants.”
The new phrase coined at this year’s Chelsea flower show was ‘English Natives’ (weeds to me and you). Its aim was to raise awareness of the depletion of habitat and decrease in numbers of the native bee, as well as other such concerns. We should be pleased if our efforts in our own gardens begin to make a difference.
However, our success really does depend on who shows up…
I’ve heard tell of several gardens not necessarily being overrun with moles, but having enough problems caused by just one, with a single molehill filling a wheelbarrow! Trying to encourage the gentleman in the black velvet waistcoat to move on to pastures new is not always easy. Though almost totally blind, the mole’s sense of smell is very acute, so pouring jay’s fluid in the run has had some effect. Sonic mole alarms, on the other hand, have little effect!
I have heard an urban myth of one land-owner plumbing his Land Rover exhaust to a hose and inserting said hose into a mole hill. The result was a scene from the land that time forgot, as the exhaust fumes escaped from another hole in the network.
The most destructive nocturnal garden visitor is the badger. I was talking to a friend of mine about how one badger had stripped back 100 sq meters of pristine lawn in a night, resulting in the gardener fencing around the whole garden at great expense. “That’s nothing,” said my friend, “just look at one of our fields on Weeke Hill - it looks as if it’s been ploughed!”
Both the badger and Mr Mole are in search of food that resides beneath the green sward, mostly worms and the larva of the crane fly, commonly know as leather jackets. The marauding pair are intent on devouring the roots of your lawn, leading to yellowing and dead thatch in the spring.
Though there are commercial treatments available, an effective solution is to cover part of the affected area with heavy black plastic over night and remove it mid-morning. The lava comes to the surface at night and the black plastic lengthens the hours of darkness; the result is a hearty breakfast for the birds.
Despite the devastation inflicted by the above, the most curious damage I have seen was small tufts of grass plucked from the lawn, each lying a foot or so apart.
Squirrels will dig in a lawn looking for misplaced food buried last autumn, but this was not the same sort of damage.
This, I later discovered, was what is known as “Zirkelm”, a term derived from the German word ‘Zerkel’. This translates as ‘a pair of compasses’, but more appropriate here would be ‘open-billed probing’. The culprit is the rook, as described in Mark Cocker’s book Crow Country, ”who uses its stiletto like bill with its gnarled hilt of bone coloured skin to probe 5-6 cm beneath the surface in search of invertebrates and arthropods. The bird waddling along then, seemingly at random, punches its beak down with some force, then shifts its body around for better to prise open a cavity in which to search.”
General care this month
Prune side shoots on restricted fruit trees (such as espaliers and fans) to three to four leaves to form fruiting spurs. If necessary, prune nectarines, apricots and peaches after they have fruited and prune plums, gages and damsons immediately after harvest.
Irregular watering can lead to problems with blossom-end rot in tomatoes, splitting of root vegetables and flower abortion in runner beans. Help prevent this by watering well during dry spells.
Weeds can also compete with vegetables for water and act as hosts for pests and diseases, so remove regularly by hoeing.
Marrows should be raised off the ground slightly to prevent them discolouring from contact with the soil.
Take care when thinning out any late-sown carrot seedlings to prevent the scent released attracting carrot-fly females.
First Published August 2013 By The Dart
