Small Plot? No Problem!

Look who I found trundling around my back garden at 8pm this evening:

It's not a great photo, but I didn't want to frighten the little chap too much and the light was already getting dim enough to need flash. I don't think it's the same one I saw at seven o'clock the other morning, marching determinedly across the lawn with a big bundle of grass in its mouth (presumably a female building a nest?), as it was huge and this fellow was only about average-sized.

Anyway, thanks to the bantam ladies for alerting me to his presence - they don't like unfamiliar creatures in their territory, but at least hedgehogs are safe from attack (unlike mice)!

We have rats in the garden.

Two and a half years of chicken-keeping, and this is the first time we've had a problem. I don't know if it's because we no longer have an outdoor cat, or because the council cut back all the shrubs and bushes in the spring and deprived the rats of natural sources of food and shelter, but they've decided to make a new home in our garden. I wouldn't mind - I'm a zoologist after all, and few beasties bother me - but rats carry salmonella (and worse), and my poor girls are too scared of them to sleep in the eglu. This means war!

I've just logged onto the Grow Your Own forum for the first time in absolutely ages and found a message saying that my bit of chicken-keeping advice had been chosen for the "Over to You" section of the December issue! Embarrassingly, I hadn't even gotten round to reading that issue yet, as I was busy in November with the launch of our big project at work. Lo and behold, there it is, slap bang in the middle of the page with a nice photo of a hen :)

Even better, the reward for publication is a ten-pound T&M voucher, which may well go towards some raspberry canes if we get the patch cleared in time...

I'm sad to report that earlier this month we received written notice to quit our allotment. As you may guess from the neglected state of this blog, we have both been very busy with our day-jobs this summer, and the weeds on our allotment enjoyed the manure we dumped on the beds even more than the vegetables did. The result was that we were unable to keep our plot up to the standards required by the committee, so that's that!

It's a real shame given all the hard work we put in this spring (and that can be clearly seen the photos on this blog) - but the demand for allotments is really high these days so there's a lot of pressure. Fortunately we were able to get up there one last time to harvest what had survived our neglect: one "Uchiki Kuri" squash, some half-dried borlotti beans, a few small celeriac, a surprising haul of onions and carrots (over a kilo of each), plus five of the biggest sunflower heads I've ever seen! We also dug up the strawberry plants, because frankly they weren't cheap, and we have a strawberry planter at home, sitting empty and neglected...

Once I'd got over the shock I realised what a weight of guilt I'd been carrying, because my indifference to gardening magically disappeared. Suddenly I was reading gardening magazines and seed catalogues and excitedly planning what I could squeeze into my tiny back garden! The poor thing has been as sorely neglected as the lottie - because the allotment was a higher priority, so of course neither got done - but luckily I've had two weeks off work and enough fine weather to take advantage of the free time.

Hence, one raised bed is now half planted up with overwintering onions (with the other half covered, ready to sow early spinach next spring); the other bed has some late attempts at winter-hardy salads, and broad beans will go in soon. The lessons I've learnt over the past three years should stand me in good stead and help me to produce a decent crop, even from the tiny space I have left.

I was so upset at first that I deleted this blog. Fortunately I had a backup of most of the site, so I've only had to reconstruct the last couple of entries, though it looks like the categories and tagging have gone AWOL...