A flurry of uninvited garden visitors 

We seem to spend a good amount of time at the moment trying to manage the different uninvited garden visitors we’re getting. The kitchen garden is a favourite with mice, who’ve burrowed underneath our vegetable covers and right up into the raised beds, helping themselves to the kale and kalettes, most of the broccoli, and one of the kohlrabi in the neighbouring vegetable bed. After months of sowing seeds and planting them out, the destruction was pretty devastating. We’ve managed to catch and relocate three mice so far, but I’m sure they’re still there – one of the traps has since been emptied albeit not triggered – so we’re keeping them there for now. We don’t mind the mice taking some of the strawberries as we have enough to share, and they seemed to stop with the redcurrants once I put the mint and mint essential oil down; but clearing almost the entire crop of 3 of our veg is not as forgivable! we’ve planted more broccoli and kale seeds so hopefully they’ll grow quickly enough for us to get a decent crop later in the year. 

At least the vegetable covers we made last year are seemingly keeping what we think is a rabbit out! We’ve not actually seen it in the kitchen garden but the spinach leaves have been nibbled right up to the plastic wire at rabbit height, so we’re pretty sure it’s a rabbit. We’ll never be able to rabbit-proof the garden so it’s more about managing the losses – fingers crossed it goes back to enjoying the grass in the back garden instead! 

Our other problem visitor is the slugs – almost every gardener’s issue!! However many we move, there seem to be more, even in the hot weather. I’ve taken to going outside in the middle of the night, armed with salt, but they’re never-ending, and so destructive. Every couple of weeks we end up emptying the cold frame and removing 6-7 who have hidden away. I spent Sunday morning clearing all the nettles that have grown up behind the new raised beds, in case that’s been encouraging them. It definitely wasn’t the best job to do on a hot day in shorts and t-shirt – most of the nettles were 1.5-2m high with multiple nettles coming off a thick mega-stem, perfect for flipping back into your face and legs when you try to pull them out… 

Our other two set of visitors were incredibly co-incidentally timed… we’ve been here almost two years now and never had any problems with the local animals until a few weeks’ ago, when two of next door’s calves escaped through a ditch and into our garden. John was away and so the elderly couple and I had an eventful Friday evening trying to herd them back through the ditch, only to have one scale our garden wall up to the front lawn to avoid us, and the other taking the opportunity to sneak off into the back garden! Luckily they didn’t do any damage at all, and found their way back fairly quickly. 

Then this week, I came down to the wood with the pup one morning to find three sheep belonging to our other local farmer munching away on the grass. They were pretty surprised to see me! This time it was a bit easier to get them back – there’s a double fence between our wood and their field, with a stile we can use to access our water meter. Somehow they’d managed to get into the middle of the fence and then hopped over the stile. It didn’t look quite as easy for them going back (they jumped the full length of the stile over both fences) but hopefully they won’t do it again in a hurry! We’ve blocked the route with a sheet of MDF until the farmers can mend the fence – last thing we need is for the dog to come across a couple of sheep in the garden…