The Croftless Crofter
I finally planted out the first (and second) sowings of pea and bean seedlings this week, slightly overdue really as some of them had long since outgrown their cardboard loo roll inner pots.
A combination of worries about late frosts and lack of time to be outside prevented me getting them in any earlier.
The raised bed, which has been covered with cardboard over winter, along with some of our own well-composted garden waste is now a worm-filled and healthy patch of ground.
Our chickens have been scratching around in it for weeks and hopefully removed some of the micro menace creatures who will no doubt be munching on my tender little seedlings given half a chance.
As the saying goes though “if something is not eating your plants then your garden is not part of the ecosystem”.
Hopefully a combination of sacrificial plants for those creatures to eat and plenty of encouragement of things which will eat them into our garden thanks to our bird feeder (which attracts lots of slug and snail eating birds), wildlife pond (home to newts), damp and shaded areas (home to toads) and warm and sheltered spots (home to slow worms) means they have at least a fighting chance of reaching fully grown and cropping plants to be feeding us too.
Elsewhere in the garden we are attempting to discourage the pine marten from being quite such a regular visitor to us.
We have spotted it a few times at dusk but a new trail cam set up to beep when it detects movement and capture photos and video shows it coming into the garden multiple times every night.
Whilst many residents and visitors to the peninsula are delighted to catch a glimpse of one, for anyone who keeps chickens they are an unwanted visitor.
We have lost chickens to them and unlike the fox who takes the chicken away and at least makes a meal of the bird, pine martens tend to kill and just eat certain parts of the bird leaving the unpleasant evidence – and most of the chicken – behind.
Our pine marten deterrent is a waterproof rechargeable radio tuned to a talking station next to the chicken coop during the hours of darkness.
We couple this with me dashing outside to wave my arms about and shout “Pine marten be gone!” (or something similar….) if I catch a glimpse of it or the trail cam alarm goes off while I am still up.
In an effort to increase our flock of chickens we have borrowed an incubator and hatched four chicks who are currently in a brood box in the house until they are grown enough to be introduced to the rest of the flock.
The reality of any landbased crops of livestock is that you are always fighting, taming or co-existing with nature.
The slugs who eat my seedlings and the foxes and pine martens who prey upon our chickens were here first - this is their territory which we are trying to snatch a little corner of to make it work for us.
Our introduction of vulnerable crops or animals will always, and should always, be at their mercy because anything other than a subtle interference (or the odd shouted swear word after dark) is stepping just too far away from the very reason we live here and overstepping our place in the ecosystem.