Willowherbs: Weeds which might, actually, have a use!

Well, I never thought I would say these words, but the other day I found a Willowherb which was, for once, more than just a weed.

Here it is:

Can you see all those scoopy round holes in the leaves?

Those are from Leaf Cutter Bees, a subject about which I have written, some years back: solitary bees who replicate by burying their eggs individually, inside tidy little cocoons made from circles cut from leaves: each egg gets a store of pollen, and a secure little pod in which to grow and develop, safe from predators.

Previously, I have noticed this damage mostly on Rose leaves: occasionally on other garden plants, but mostly on Roses.

So it was quite a surprise to find a nasty old Willowherb showing the same holes in the leaves.

Alas, this damage is only cosmetic and does not harm the plant, so I had to weed out the Willowherb anyway... but it's nice to know that someone finds them useful!

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Buzzy Bee at work

The other day, I was working in one of "my" gardens when I heard a lot of intermittent buzzing.

"What's going on?" I wondered. 

Bees  - along with hover-flies, wasps, and many other pollinating insects - usually buzz continuously, not in short bursts. Or so I thought!

Moving closer, I found the culprit on one of the many Poppies, which are making a terrific show this year.  It was a bee - and I shall call it a Bumble Bee because it was Bumbling its way around the stamens - hard at work.

 

 

 Can you see it?

Not the best of photos, but then, I am a gardener, not a photographer: and when I do take photos, they are hasty snaps with my camera-phone. 

I was so intrigued by what he was up to, that I tilted the flower up towards the light (so that I could see it better) and to my surprise, he continued bumbling, at high speed, taking no notice of me, whatsoever.

I wanted to share this activity with the garden owner, who loves bees: so I thought I'd try taking a video of it.

This was moderately successful: it wanders in and out of focus a bit, because it's only a phone, and you can see where, a few seconds in, I took hold of the petals to steady the flower. 

Here's the result, what do you think?

Active little fellows, aren't they?

So next time you hear sporadic buzzing, from inside a large flower, this is probably what's going on!

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It's amazing what you dig up in other people's gardens....

I'm always digging up mildly interesting things - broken pottery, shards of glass, once even a dead body... long story, don't ask. Well, ok, maybe one day I'll tell you all about it...

The other day, I was merrily weeding around the base of a Mulberry tree, and at the back of it, between the trunk and the wall, there was something sticking up out of the ground.

It looked for all the world like a boot-scraper: you know, the old-fashioned sort with a horizontal bar of metal, usually embedded in a stone, or in concrete, beside the front door.

This caught my eye because, not ten minutes earlier, I had gone into my Client's house to use the loo and Mrs Client had made a passing remark about wondering where the boot scraper had got to. 

I always remove my boots before entering the house: well-meaning Clients often say "Oh, just come on in, don't worry about taking your boots off, we're used to it, stone floors, etc etc" but they have no idea just how muddy I can get when digging their garden... so I always take my boots off.

Except for that one time, last week... but no, I can't bear to admit to it. Sorry, Barbara.  Moving on.

So, I always (nearly always) remove my boots, Mrs Client mentioned a boot scraper, and then I saw what looked like one. You can see the train of thought... perhaps this was the missing boot scraper?

What would it have been doing, way out in the garden? Buried up to its neck? I know, I know, clearly I wasn't really thinking, I was "in the zone" of Zen Weeding - you know, that state where your hands are working on auto-pilot and your mind is busily planning the order of the next few jobs, how to get out that Cistus root without breaking another fork (er hem), wondering anew at the way there are such a wide range of weeds available, but how in any one area of the garden there are rarely more than two or three species...  so I took hold of it and pulled.

And this came out of the ground:

Hmmm... not a boot scraper, then! 

Although, looking at the entire thing, you can see a certain family resemblance to old-fashioned boot scrapers, can't you?

But it's clearly a trap of some kind.

The pair of eye-protector specs on the table should give you some idea of size: far too large to be a mouse-trap, not large enough to be a bear-trap, so what would it be for?

Rats, is the logical next suggestion,  and Mrs Client told me that the previous owners had had chickens in an outhouse in that direction. It is possible, then,  that traps were set to catch the rats running along beside the wall - the advice, for catching rats, is always to work out where their "runs" are, and to place the traps along the run.

"How old do you think it is?" asked Mrs Client.

"I have no idea," I replied, thinking that it looked rather old-fashioned, but not ancient, if you see what I mean. "Maybe 1930s, 20s?"  The style of it looked too elegant to be contemporary: the mud and rust with which was encrusted obviously made it look "old", but still, the design did not look modern.

After work, I did some research online, and at first it seemed as though it might be older than I'd thought, Victorian, possibly: I found quite a lot of pictures of wrought iron traps from that era, but nothing quite the same.

Eventually, I found it: it turned out to be a mole trap, which at least explains why it was buried in the soil.

The amazing part is that they are still being made today, to exactly the same design! Just look at that, then compare it to the picture above.

Snap!

Talking of which, I was shaking and scraping the mud off, while talking to Mrs Client, and I had just said "I think it's rusted solid" when it suddenly pinged undone in my hands!

Luckily it's not a finger-trapping sort of trap: when it went off,  the legs at the bottom closed together, presumably around the body of the offending mole.

But it made both of us jump, I can tell you!

Once we'd recovered from that, Mrs Client told me that they have lived there for nearly 20 years, so it's at least that old - but certainly not Victorian.

The only mystery remaining is that of why it was still there, upright and still "set", despite the fact that the bed in question had been dug over, at least three or four times in the past 20 years!

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The perils of feeding birds on your lawn

I've written several articles about feeding birds in the garden, just type the word "birds" into the search box, top left, if you are interested.

But today is a warning against putting bird feeders on your lawn.

One of my Clients wanted to move their feeding station onto the grass in front of their window, partly so that they could watch the birds more closely (a perfectly reasonable idea, considering how much it costs to buy the bird food), and partly because they were making such a mess on the patio.

I warned them that it would ruin the grass underneath, but they didn't believe me. 

Me: "I should warn you that the birds will scatter a lot of seeds, and they will germinate in the lawn."

Them: "No problem, we'll just mow them down." 

(the sprouting seeds, not the birds)

(at least, I hope so....)

Me: "...and the birds will make quite a mess of the grass."

Them: "It won't matter if they poop on the grass," they said, "because it's biodegradable."

Me: *silently, to myself* "You are going to regret this...."

So I moved the feeding station, we hung all the feeders back up, and they were very pleased.

Two weeks later, I arrived to find that the bird feeding station had been moved back onto the patio.

And this is why: 

Yup, there is a large patch of grass which has been completely ruined: those bare patches are hard and glazed, where many bird (and rat!) feet have stomped around while pecking up (or eating) the fallen seed.  

Wild birds (and rats) aren't like chickens, which scratch to find food, therefore scarifying and lifting the ground: they just eat the loose seeds, then flatten it right down.

I find this in my own garden, where my bird feeders are over shingle: the shingle becomes weirdly compacted, to the point where, every so often, I have to go out with a Daisy Grubber and physically loosen it.

Taking a closer look at this lawn: 

...you can see that there are also areas of fluffy white mould/fungus.

These are formed when a clump of seeds gets wet and sticks together (often due to being pooed upon) and then rots.

Even the rats won't eat it!

You can see what damage it has done to the grass, but what you can't see is how rock-hard the whole area now is. There is a solid crust all the way across the area.

Lovely!

So I will have to scarify the area, maybe I'll enrich it a little, with some compost, then a generous fistful of grass seed, in the hopes that it's still warm enough (mid October, as I write) for the grass to germinate and fill in the bare patch.

So, give some though to where you site your bird feeders: and accept that feeding birds will result in a certain amount of mess!

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Hedgehogs in my garden

Or, The Strange Tale of the Goings-On In My Back Garden Last Week.

There I was, sitting quietly indoors the other evening, when I heard a kerfuffle in my back garden. Not exactly an uncommon occurrence, but it seemed to be going on a bit, so, intrigued, I flung open the patio doors, whereupon it all went quiet. 

Taking up a torch, I stepped outside. 

At this point, we have to briefly go back in time: for some reason, my garden is quite a lot lower than my house, enough that I nearly broke my ankle the first time I stepped out, so I built some steps to make it easier.

Over the years, I've tried various styles, and the best seems to be simple decking planks, screwed onto "joists" made of fence posts.

 Here are the current steps - left - being built, about three years ago: yes, I know they look like pallets, but I assure you, they are made from the finest quality decking planks, no expense spared... and once they were painted, they looked fine.

Stepping down, then, I shone the torch out into the garden, and found that there was a rather nice ginger cat, terrorising a rather large hedgehog.

I looked at the cat. He looked at me. I gave him a "it's not edible you know," look. He returned it with a "yes I know that, but I am asserting my dominance over slow-moving critters." stare.

I went for a rather stern "it's my garden, matey, thou shalt not claim dominance here," look, at which he rolled his eyes, sighed, and, clearly thinking "we'll see who owns this garden once you have gone to bed, hur, hur," he stalked off in a lordly manner, his dignity only slightly diminished by having to squeeze inelegantly under the gap in my side fence which I leave for the convenience of hedgehogs and cats who are too lazy to jump over it.

The hedgehog, meanwhile, had gone into Ravenous Bugblatter beast of Traal mode, ie pretending that, if he couldn't see me, then I couldn't see him. Knowing that hedgehogs in this situation will stay perfectly still for a minute or more, I went back indoors, turned off the lights, opened the window, and sneakily watched him from above.

Sure enough, a minute and a half later, he started moving again, and bumbled around outside the window, before heading off for the steps.

I watched, in fascination, to see what he would do: and rather than go round, or up and over (they are quite high steps, for hedgehogs, although their legs are a lot longer than "one" would think, from looking at them) he went straight underneath my decking steps.

Under the steps? Why? Why?

Closing the window, I went back to the patio doors, and looked out - he was visible between the planks (Memo to self: time to repaint them, getting a bit shabby), and he was just standing there.

For a long time. I stood and watched, for minute after minute. (oh no, I can feel a Monty Python sketch approaching...) 

A minute passed.

Another minute passed, followed by another, different, minute.

I waited a minute, while a minute passed swiftly past.

This was it! A minute passed.

Sorry, end of diversion....

There he is, can you see him?  

He'd been there for so long, that I did have a momentary concern that he'd somehow get trapped under there - can hedgehogs reverse, with all those spines? Would he get stuck? Would I have to go outside and lift the steps up to free him? Should I have boxed off the sides of the steps to prevent such disasters?

While I was pondering, I heard more rustling and bumbling sounds, and a second hedgehog appeared from the darkness, apparently quite unconcerned by my torchlight.

The first one didn't seem to be particularly interested in the second one, and continued snuffling about under the steps, moving quite freely in the fairly large gap under the step. I need not have worried about him getting stuck, he seemed perfectly comfortable: and maybe this explains why I find bits of broken snail shell in the gap under the steps, on those rare occasions where I lift them and sweep underneath them....

After a couple more minutes of snuffling,  Hedgehog Number 1 emerged from under the steps, and wandered off across the garden, bumping into Hedgehog Number 2 as he went. And I do mean "bumping into", they literally bumped into each other, then trundled off around my garden, presumably in search of more small edibles.

And that, dear reader, was the story of What Happened in my Back Garden Last Week!

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When Grass Snakes shed their skins...

OK, you guys are probably going to say "Huh, we see these all the time," in a dismissive way, but I was fascinated the other day, to discover a complete cast-off grass snake skin, in one of "my" gardens.

 

 

Here it is, I moved it onto the grass in order to get a better photo, as it's translucent,

 

it's about 2' long, and must have been shed fairly shortly before I found it, because they are fragile, and it would have disintegrated in no time.

The detail was incredible - you could literally see every scale, and you could clearly see the difference between the smaller scales on the back, and the longer ones underneath, where it "walks".

I'm sure you know that snakes, not having any legs, "walk" on their ribs, and they use the rough edges of those lower scales to get a grip on whatever they are walking on.

You can even see his little eyes!!

Isn't that astonishing??!

Hilariously, this skin was found on the decking next to the stream, so it almost looks as though the snake took off its skin, before going in for a swim...

I had thought this was a fairly large one, but having done a cursory internet search, they get quite a lot bigger than this: and apparently female grass snakes shed their skins before laying eggs, so maybe there will be a new generation of little grass snakes, in a couple of months.

I shall keep a careful look-out for them!

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The trouble with feeding the birds....

...especially if you offer seed, to attract finches....

 .... as I was doing, last winter: here's my seed feeder, hanging on the fence and extremely popular with the little birdies, as you can see by the low level of the seed in it.





So what is the problem?



The problem is.....

... that you get a forest of"crop" seedlings underneath it - particularly if you have shingle, which is apparently the perfect growing medium for birdseed!

Lovely, huh?

I see this repeated everywhere I go, even when people buy seed which has been treated and is allegedly "non germinating".

Even if you position your bird feeders on a patio, you will still find that the seeds will grow - in the cracks or joins between the slabs, usually, which can be very ugly, and quite destructive.

Sometimes it can be interesting: for example, one Client asked me to move her birdfeeder to a different position, and to dig over the bed on which it stood, replanting the area with some perennials.

Two weeks later, these guys started popping up:

How exciting! 

What on earth are they?

Yes, I know what they are really, I'm just trying to build some suspense...

It's Nicandra physalodes, commonly known as Shoo Fly. I don't know why. They don't repel flies.  Cursory internet research suggests that no-one else knows why, either...

If you're not familiar with this plant, well, it's a weed, properly speaking, although you will find the seeds for sale, bizarrely. It's not particularly attractive to bees:  the flowers - which are blue, and moderately attractive - open for a short time, just a couple of hours, then they are done: and the plant itself can get quite big, but is also quite lax, so it ends up flopping around all over your bed. 

So it's not really a "worthwhile" plant in the garden.

But it was interesting to see it, along with various cereal crops - millet, wheat (that was exciting!), and several that I couldn't immediately identify, and didn't dare leave for too long, as they were getting quite big. 

There is a case to be made, for leaving some of them to grow, then harvesting the seeds... free bird food! But most of the time, they are just scruffy, untidy weeds, cluttering up your border (or in my case, my shingle) and detracting from the general beauty of the garden.

And what is the moral of this tale?

I won't be feeding the finches, this year. I'll stick to fat-balls in cages, for the little birdies which I like to see - I always laugh at the sparrows, pretending to be blue tits:

 

..but if you want to attract birds but not plants, then here is a quick summary of how to reduce the mess, and reduce the amount of weeding you might have to do.

Firstly, buy the right product:- 

Niger seed is sterile, so it won't germinate.

Fat balls/suet logs or slabs = no germination. Presumably the seeds within in have been cooked...

Meal worms = do not grow into plants! 

Sunflower hearts/hulled sunflower seeds = processed, so they won't germinate

Avoid cheap bird seed, it will have a high proportion of cheap "filler" seed such as Milo, and Millet: avoid Milo in particular, as birds tend not to eat it! It's a type of grass, the seeds look very similar to Millet.

Choose a "no mess" bird seed: they remove the husks and other bits of inedible material, so the birds don't have to rootle through it (flinging it about as they do so) in order to reach the good stuff.  Allegedly.

So there you go, some simple advice on how to feed the birds this winter, without spending the whole of next year weeding!

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How to get rid of Ants in the Lawn

Is it just me, or are there more ants around than there used to be?

I frequently get questions from anxious garden-owners, fretting about the large bumps ruining their lawns: and certainly I would say that over the last few years, I have seen more and more of them myself.

So what's going on?  What are they doing? Well, they are building homes for themselves by creating a complicated system of galleries, which are tunnels and chambers, underneath the ground. To do this, they excavate the earth and take it up to the surface. As the surface rises, the bare ground is able to absorb heat from the sun, and the whole thing becomes a sort of organic storage heater. Inside the heap, the worker ants move the  eggs, larvae and pupae around as the sun moves, in order to keep them in the warmest part.

Unfortunately, in doing so, they ruin our lawns.

So what can we do about them? To encourage them to go and nest elsewhere, keep the grass cut short, and keep running about on it: the galleries are fragile in the early days, and a lack of disturbance is vital - the mounds cannot form in frequently mown areas. They are also vulnerable to damage by erosion and compaction by trampling, so get out there and dance under the moonlight!

If you prefer chemical warfare, get out the ant powder and dust the tops of the hills lightly whenever you find them. I also put a light dusting of ant powder all the way around the heap, to catch any stragglers who might be going out exploring.

If you don't notice the anthills until they are quite big, then use a hand tool to fluff up the soil on the top, and if you find ants, dust them. If not, spread out the loose soil and dust it anyway, then work it down to ground level by gently brushing the grass to and fro. The idea is not to smother the ants, but to produce a well-dusted zone that they can't avoid walking through. Each ant picks up a light coating of the ant powder, then walks it back inside the nest - ants never wipe their feet.

If it's wet, so you can't easily move aside the loose soil, use a trowel to make two slits about 4" long at right angles to each other, then lever up this "flap" to reveal the horrors below. If it's teeming with ants, apply powder, put the flap down and stomp it flat. That'll teach them!

If you have really, really big anthills, then stomping them flat will leave you with big brown pancakes all over your lawn, so with those, it's better to wear gloves, and to scoop off the entire above-lawn part. Put it into a bucket, and sprinkle ant powder on it. Don't immediately tip it out somewhere else, as you would merely be re-locating the ants - make sure they get a good dusting of ant powder, and check the bucket a couple of times before tipping the soil out elsewhere in the garden: stir the soil, and if there are still signs of life, sprinkle more ant powder on them. Repeat until they are all dead.

The moral of this story is, the longer you leave them, the worse they will get so it's worth dusting and flattening them as soon as you spot them. 

The more activity you have on the lawn, the less chance the lumps will have to grow out of control: firstly because you will spot them and powder them, and secondly because you will be physically flattening them.

So, make stomping round your lawn part of your daily routine!

 

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How to remove Ivy from mature trees - and why!

I work as a volunteer on my local canal - the Wilts & Berks Canal, which now runs mostly through Oxfordshire, due to some changes with county boundaries, but let's not get started on that - and we are often faced with this issue.

Ivy grows up the trees.

Massive, massive amounts of it.

We have to cut it down.

And inevitably, one lone passer-by gets all upset, and starts berating us for removing the wildlife habitat/disturbing the nesting birds/bats/whatever.  

Tact and diplomacy are the name of the game, when you work as a volunteer on an amenity with public access, so we never actually slap them around the head with a frond of ivy, tempting though it is. 

Instead, we explain carefully and politely that there are several very good reasons for removing ivy from deciduous trees: I've written several articles on the subject of ivy removal and why it is often necessary, just type the word "ivy" into the Search box, top left of the page, and see for yourself.

For the canal, though, the main reason is safety. Ivy hides a multitude of sins, and the trees which grow along the canal - and by this, I don't mean the proper mixed hedging that you get on the outside boundaries, I mean the ones growing between the towpath and the canal bed - are sinful indeed.

They are mostly Ash and Willow: they are ALL self-set, which a polite term for "weeds". And they are all going to have to be cut down once the canal is back in water, because the whole point of a canal is to have a towpath next to the water, so that horse-drawn boats can be pulled along it. Not possible with trees on the bank!

And don't shout "Horse drawn boats? Are you bonkers?!" like that, there is quite a revival of horse-drawn boats, actually. It's a lovely thing to see, and far more fun than a smelly, chugging diesel engine. And who knows, with rising fuel prices, fuel scarcity, a return to old technology etc, we may yet find that horse-drawn vehicles become de rigueur once more. 

As a volunteer, we do try not to cut down any of these trees just yet, unless we really have to: all mature trees are things of beauty:

...and even though they are weeds, even though they are in the wrong place, even though they are only common old Ash and Willow... they are still lovely.

 Here's part of our stretch of canal, between Stockham Park and East Challow - left - and it's pretty lush, isn't it?

However, even though the canal might appear to be an untended wild area, it actually takes a lot of unkeep, and constant monitoring and maintenance, otherwise it quickly degenerates.

Here's an example of a neglected canal: murky green water, fallen trees, impassable towpath: not very nice.

People often say "Ah, but it's a wildlife paradise!" 

Well, not really: not even the wildlife likes a stagnant canal. And if the tree fell because of disease, it could well be infecting other trees.

In this photo, the dead tree fell over the canal, luckily: if it had fallen the other way, over the towpath, it could have been very serious.

So we need to spot these dead trees before they become unstable, and squash an innocent passer-by.

Part of being able to spot trees which are in trouble, is simply being able to see them, to assess their health, and this requires the removal of the ivy.

Our normal method is simply to cut through the ivy stems, at a convenient height. We pull out as much of the upper ivy as we can, and we keep an eye on re-growth.

Here - left - is how to do it properly.

Take a sharp pruning saw (that orange thing), and carefully sever the stems, cutting out a section a couple of inches long.

Pull or push out the short cut section, which makes it easier to do all the other stems, because now you can see where you are, you can see the bark of the tree, and you don't get your knuckles bashed.

Here - right - is how to do it wrongly.

 Whoever did this one, cut far too deeply, and has cut right into the bark of the tree.

No! No!

This is bad.

You can see that they also failed to take out the cut sections, which is just laziness.

 

And this is why it is so important for us to carry out this ivy removal.

The tree on the left here: can you see that large vertical fissure?

It's rot.

The wood is completely rotted away, to a depth of several inches into the trunk - it's like sponge, you can poke it out with your fingers.

This tree is going to be felled with some urgency, along with a few others which we found to be also in a very poor state, with large areas of rot. 

So next time you are walking along the canal, and you see trees which have had their enshrouding ivy stems cut through, don't wail about the loss of the ivy, be grateful that someone is striving to keep your towpath safe, for you to walk along it, and enjoy the trees!

Oh, and ps, if you want to know more about the Wilts & Berks Canal, here's their website.

 

 

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Ponds: how to create a wildlife pond when you have no room for a pond

Everyone wants a wildlife pond, these days: and it's a great thing to have, because it brings a surprising variety of creatures into your garden.

But what do you do, if you don't have room for a pond?

Or if you are concerned about the safety aspects?

Here's a solution: make a Tiny Pond.

Simple instructions:

Take a plastic container.

Sink it into the ground.

Place rocks and stones around it.

Fill with water.

All done!

 As always with gardening, there is a little bit more to it than that: so here are the detailed instructions.

Firstly, find a plastic container. It doesn't matter what size or shape it is, as long as it holds water.

Choose a good location - somewhere that you can see it, but not somewhere where you are going to keep treading on it. This one is next to a fence, just at the end of the gap between the shed and the fence, which means there is a nice "tunnel" or "runway" which is frequented by nocturnal visitors. 

Dig a hole large enough for the container, such that the rim is sitting at ground level, and that it's flat and level. If you don't have a spirit level to hand, just put the container in the hole, and fill it with water - you will then see if it's level or not. Adjust it until it sits level - there is nothing more annoying than any sort of water feature which is not level!

Take some biggish rocks, and lay them around the edges, to break up the regular outline. We do this because we want it to look "natural", even though it clearly isn't!

Put at least one or two large rocks inside the container: this creates perching points, and also helps smaller creatures to get out: if the container is quite large, then put a piece of flattish rock, or wood, sloping into it, to create a ladder or ramp, for easy entrances and exits.

And that's pretty much it! 

Top it up with water from time to time: it's better to use water from the water butt if you have one (and if you don't, why not??!), otherwise fill a watering can with tap water, and leave it for 4-5 days for the chlorine to evaporate.

Most of the wildlife which will benefit from your Tiny Pond will be nocturnal, so unless you have a PIR activated camera, you probably won't see much activity: you can try spreading a layer of wet sand around it, then smoothing it out each evening: next day, you can look for tracks, and see who came to visit!

In my own back garden, I have a very linear, non-pond-like feature (it's actually a moat, to keep the slugs out of my lettuce stand - hang on, I'll find a picture of it):

There you go, you can see that the water in the moat is rather green, but the wildlife seem to prefer it that way.

I have seen frogs in this moat: the squirrels, hedgehogs and cats all drink from it: and the little birds love it, they frolic around having baths, as well as drinking from it. 

And that's just the ones I see, in the day time!

I put this in, to illustrate that you don't have to make your Tiny Pond as real-looking as the one at the top of this article: my moat is about as artificial as it can get, being just some square-section guttering, set into the ground, but it still attracts the wildlife!

 

 

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How to: create a Hedgehog Highway

This topic is very much "on trend" at the moment: people in towns are becoming aware that we are losing vast numbers of our hedgehogs, and are trying to take steps to help them.

Generally speaking, this is a good thing: as long as people realise that hedgehogs put the "wild" in "wildlife": they are not cute, cuddly, tame things - they are actually wild, outdoor critters, and they do NOT make good pets!

They have spines, fleas, big claws, and they poo incessantly. Ask anyone who feeds hedgehogs in their garden - the amount of messy poo on the patio is quite incredible! 

Wild hedgehogs look like this:

They are pretty much browny-grey in colour: they have little piggy eyes, smallish ears, set well baack on their heads, and - and this is the Big Clue - look at those enormous feet and claws.

These are used for digging: wild hedgehogs dig burrows, they dig for food, so they have big claws.

They are nocturnal, which means that they start to get active, and interesting, just as we are settling down for the evening.

Most of the "cute" pictures of hedgehogs which you will see on the internet are not wild UK hedgehogs at all, they are African Pygmy Hedgehogs, which are very popular in the US as pets (and I have every expectation that they will find their way into the UK as pets as well, depressingly...). 

They look like this:

Aren't they adorable?

Note the white underneaths, the white faces: our wild hedgehogs are usually - not always, but usually - just plain brown or grey.

Note also the bigger ears, set rather higher on the face, giving them that cute "nearly human" look. 

Many of them have the darker "mask" on their faces, but - the biggest giveaway - look at their teeny tiny feet. 

Tiny.

No claws.

That's because they come from Africa (bit of a clue in the name, huh?), where the soil is light and sandy: plus, they are scavengers, rather than hunters. So they don't need hulking great claws.

There are two other facts about African Pygmy hedgehogs (and yes, they are considerably smaller than our wild ones, but that's tricky, because for all you know, you are looking at a young, wild one...) which are extremely relevant, but unfortunately, invisible.

1) they are not resistant to wild hedgehog diseases. So if they meet wild hogs, they will probably get ill, and may well die. 

2) they need to be kept at a temperature of at least 22 degrees - Africa, remember? - so if they are left outside in the UK, or released into the wild, they will die. They. Will. Die. 

The only good thing about it, is that they are a different genus (Atelerix albiventris) from our wild hedgehogs (Erinaceus europaeus), so at least they can't interbreed.

So, getting back to wild Hedgehogs, what can we, the UK gardeners, do to help these little guys?  

First and most obvious, don't feed them! Far more Hedgehogs die from being fed the wrong food, than from starvation. There is a mass of contradictory information on the internet, as to what is the "correct" food for wild hogs, just as there is for feeding the ducks:  but the bottom line is that these are wild animals, and we should not attempt to semi-tame them by feeding them, for our entertainment.

Yes, I know that they are adorable to watch, as they bumble around on your patio. I often have close encounters with Hedgehogs in my open porch (why do they lurk in my porch? why? why? I have no idea), and I always enjoy seeing them, but I don't feel the need to have them put on a Busby Berkely style routine, so that I can sit there and watch them for an hour.

I can hear you shouting at the screen "but we are saving them!". No, you are not. Putting out food for wild hogs disturbs their natural lifestyle, in several ways.

Firstly, you are forcing them to come to a particular spot, at a particular time: in unnatural quantities. How many videos have you watched, on the internet, of hogs fighting over the food dishes? Oh yes, very amusing to watch, but you are putting these normally quite solitary creatures into larger groups, which leads to disputes, over-crowding, and disease.

 You are also making them vulnerable to predators:  yes, Mr Fox will also learn that you put out food every night, and he'll happily eat the food, and will also eat any fat little hogs which you have trained to step into his parlour.

And what happens, on the day that you get bored, run out of food, or go away on holiday? Suddenly, there is an unnaturally large population, and their main food source has disappeared. They. Will. Die. You have forced them to become dependant on you, and if you fail them, for whatever reason, then they will struggle to re-establish an ecologically sound population.

And, of course, they'll struggle all the more because, if you've been feeding them, they will - to some extent - have lost their natural hunting and food-finding skills. 

It is far better to encourage Hedgehogs to enjoy your garden in an appropriate, "wild" way, and the simplest, cheapest, and possibly the single most helpful thing that "one" can do for wildlife, if "one" lives on a housing estate, is to help to create a Hedgehog Highway.

This just means cutting the occasional hole in your boundary fences: small, ground-level holes in the fence, no more than about 5" (13cm) high and wide, and preferably in a slightly tucked-away location. Round the back of the shed is perfect, or under the sheltering overhang of a shrub. 

And what a difference it makes! It can suddenly change a run of gardens from being a row of sterile boxes, into a linear highway, for hedgehogs and other small mammals. 

Here are a couple of examples, pinched off the internet:

Some are custom-made, which is fine - and I rather like the rustic one, where they have just made use of a damaged slat, in the boarded fence.

Even just scraping out a low scoop under the bottom board of the fence will help.

Yes, the local cats will probably also use them, but they would otherwise climb over the fences anyway, so it's not as though you were opening up anything new to them... and it's a small price to pay, for creating connected environments for our wildlife.

I particularly like the bottom left one - the slatted fence. This is a timely reminder that Hedgehogs have surprisingly long legs, and can manage steps quite well.

They can also run astonishingly fast: if you've only ever encountered them unexpectedly, you might think that all they do is stand very, very still, until eventually, if you wait long enough, they might shuffle off, in an embarrassed fashion.

(Side note: once, encountering a particularly large specimen in my open porch, I stood there to watch him, because I wanted to know what he was actually doing, in my porch. I stood there, looming over him like the Statue of Liberty. He stood there, motionless. We both stood there. For some time.  Then he sighed. Honestly, he huffed out a loud, rather bored, sigh: the sort that is normally accompanied by rolling of the eyes. So I retreated gently indoors and left him, the victor in that round.)

However, catch them on a good day and they can sprint like good 'uns: apparently they have been clocked at doing 9mph!!

 

The quick and easy way to make a Hedgehog hole in an existing fence is to mark out a shape on the fence, then take a drill, and drill a biggish hole. 

(Right)

Then get a jigsaw, and put the blade into the hole you have just drilled... then use the jigsaw to cut the hole.

It doesn't matter if it's a bit rough, or mis-shaped: the Hedgehogs won't care!

If you have chain-link fences, then you could try inserting a short length of pipe:

Here's a picture I found on the internet - left - of a very nice little mesh-fence tunnel, perfect for small mammals.

(Although  I don't think my massive sighing Hedgehog would fit through that pipe, to be honest!)

Having made a few Hedgehog holes in your fences, try to encourage your neighbours to do the same, so that the hogs can move around a larger territory, which gives them wider hunting areas, provides escape routes from predators, and prevents overcrowding.

There you go - simple, isn't it?  A very small, cheap change, which can have a huge impact on the health and freedom of Hedgehogs.

 

 

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How to feed the birds - without feeding the Starlings!

 I've written about feeding the birds a few times: just type the word "bird" into the search box, top left of the screen, to get a list.

The key points include having trees, or fake trees (ie fences, pergolas, or even plain wooden poles),  for them to sit on and inspect your feeders, before they come down to eat: then to have bird feeders which are suspended off the ground: and to allow them time to get acquainted with your feeders - and for the "new chemical" smell to wear off - before they will come and feed.

However, getting the birds that you actually want, as opposed to the thugs and the greedy ones, is another question, and I have provided a few answers to that knotty topic, already: one of my answers is to exclude the bigger birds - pigeon, magpies - from my feeder, by turning it into a mini-fortress.

So what about starlings, then?

I was talking to a lady the other day, who is a keen bird-feeder, and normally she complains about the mess the Starlings leave under her feeders: not to mention the way they squabble, and the tremendous racket they make!

This time, however, she was all smiles.

Why? I asked.

Well, it turns out that she'd tried out a new type of bird feed, which was seeds mixed in with very small pellets of suet; and the mess was, apparently, indescribable. The Starlings, it seems, were flinging the seeds out, in order to get to the suet.

Interesting....

So she tried removing all the suet-based feed, leaving just seeds, grain, etc: lo! and behold, a massive reduction in the number of starlings.

Which leads us to an interesting conclusion: if you don't want starlings, don't feed suet-based food.

Try it, dear reader, and let me know if it works for you.....

 

 

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Birds: how to get the "right" ones!

 I've written before about how to lure birds into your garden - but the problem can often be, not so much getting birds into your garden, but being overwhelmed by the “wrong sort” of birds.

Articles about feeding birds always have pictures of a perky robin or two, some colourful finches, a couple of plump blackbirds, some cheerful blue tits, and maybe a dear little wren. 

 In real life you are more likely to be invaded by a swarm of pigeons, heckled by a mob of starlings, threatened by magpies, or to have your feeders stripped by squirrels.

It's easy to find information about what sort of birds like what sort of food, and what sort of feeder - we all know that blue tits will cling like limpets to fat balls, or half a coconut shell filled with suet, and that finches like seeds from a high-hung tube - so but what about the less attractive ones?

Pigeons, starlings and magpies will, unfortunately, eat anything from anywhere, and it can be a bit of shock to find a garden full of them, scoffing away like gannets (another unwelcome garden visitor - fortunately, an infrequent one).

The trick is to break them of the habit of coming to your garden: by making your feeding areas unwelcoming to them, they will find other places to go.

The easiest way to do this is to use size-restricted feeders: those with an outer cage around an inner food section. This prevents the bigger birds from feeding - although they will still scavenge around the ground underneath it, for scattered leftovers. 

 

To make this happen in my small garden, I converted my bird house feeder - left - into a size-restricted zone by inserting small canes all round the edges so that larger birds could not get in, and adding some short lengths of cane on the ridge, sticking out at odd angles.

As you can see, the pigeons were still very interested in it, so I added a plastic kiddy's windmill to the top.

This was intended to discourage the pigeons from landing on the top of it, and it worked surprisingly well. The pigeons no longer even try to land there, but the smaller birds take no notice at all of it whirring round. 

Result!

It looks a bit like a miniature prisoner-of-war camp but it certainly keeps out the larger birds - although not the squirrels, as you can see from the photo, right.

 Yes, look closely, you can see the pesky squirrel is actually sitting in the feed dish... 

So, apart from fortification, how else can you select the "nicer" birds?

To deter starlings, feed your birds early in the morning - starlings are not early risers, so if you get the food out good and early, the blackbirds and smaller ones will have a chance to clear it before the scavengers arrive.

This also goes for squirrels: if you put out just enough food for “your” birds, they will clear it quickly and there won't be any left for the squirrels.

Finally, the trick to training anything is to be consistent: I always fill my feeders first thing in the morning. Every year, a few weeks into the cold weather, I come downstairs to find a row of blackbirds sitting on the fence, waiting for me. They fly away as soon as I open the door, and they take quite a few minutes to return, so they're not exactly tame: but they certainly know when to expect the food.

This is even more useful if you are lucky enough to have a regular robin or two in your garden: if you whistle a simple phrase every time you go out with the food, they will learn to expect you, and will appear when you whistle - which is just lovely!

 

 

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November: time to start feeding the birds

There was a poem I did once at school, it had a line about “No sun...no moon... no morn... no noon...”  and it ended "der dum, der dum, der dum, November."

Clearly I've forgotten most of it, including who wrote it  (errr, Thomas Hood: thank heavens for the internet!) but I'm pretty sure it doesn't have a line about “no worms, no seeds... no bugs on which to feed...” but that's probably what the birds are thinking.

As the days (and nights!) get colder, life gets harder for our feathered friends, and you might well be thinking that it's time to start feeding them. If you haven't put out bird-food in the past, maybe this year is the time to start: the news is full of stories about how wildlife is suffering in our modern, tarmac-and-concrete world, how the loss of green space is adversely affecting their lifestyles, etc, so if you've never fed the birds before, now is a good time to start.  And there are a couple of things about bird psychology which are helpful to know, if you've never done it before.

First and foremost, they want to feel safe. For birds, this means scouting out the area before landing - and that means having high perches, which are a safe distance away from the feeder. Trees are perfect, either in your garden or in that of your neighbour.

Secondly, once one comes, they all come. No-one likes to be first... so if you can lure just one bird into your garden, he will soon be followed by others.

Thirdly, birds are not very bright. It often takes them a long time to realise that you are putting food out for them.

Fourthly, different birds eat different food, and in different ways.

Fifthly (if there is such a word) birds are creatures of habit. They have “rounds”, and will circulate from one favoured feeding area to another. You'd think that, having found a bird feeder full of yummy food, they would stuff themselves until they could barely fly, but actually, it doesn't work that way: they like to have a variety of places to feed, and they like to eat a little at each place.

So, how does this relate to the real world, and our real gardens?

Firstly, feeling safe: look at your garden and check for high level scouting positions.  Do you have trees? They are best, but posts will do, and that includes the washing line. Birds love fences with trellis on top of them, which are also quite good for discouraging cats from jumping into your garden -  or, at least, it makes them scramble through the trellis, which gives the birds a bit of warning.

Secondly, luring in the first bird: try putting out a little bread, for a few days.  It's the worst thing to feed birds (where would they find processed food in nature?), but it is very visible, and it certainly attracts the “wrong” ones such as pigeons, and they, in turn, will signal to other birds that this is a feeding area. At first you might only get a few odd birds coming to your feeders, but in a while, the numbers will increase, so be patient.

Thirdly, getting their attention: when you proudly hang out your first bird feeders, don't fill them. Leave them out there, empty for a couple of days. I know, I know, it seems daft, but read on. Then put a small amount of food in them, and be prepared to replace it if it's not eaten in a week. As I said, it takes them a while to notice the new feed station, and there's nothing more depressing than buying six different types of seed, nut, suet and fat ball feeders, then finding them untouched and mouldy after a month. Also - and this is only my opinion - I think that birds are repelled by the chemical smells of a new feeder, so letting them “air” for a couple of weeks gives them time to lose that factory smell.

Fourthly, decide which type of bird you want to attract: if you want finches, you will need a tall narrow seed-feeder, for example, and they like it hung high up. Dunnocks won't fly up to a bird feeder at all, and only eat from ground level. Tits of all types are agile and enjoy hanging off a fat ball or a half-coconut, but robins prefer something they can grip with their feet, such as a wire cage with loose fat balls inside it.

And fifthly (still not sure if that's a real word), once you start - keep on going. Regularity is what the birds want more than anything else, and once you have trained them to come to your feeders, you will need to keep up the good work. In my garden, I always refill my feeders first thing, then I sit and eat my breakfast while looking out at the garden. "My" birds have learned to come early, to beat the pigeons, so I get the benefit of watching them while stuffing in the porridge, and they get first peck, instead of just getting the leftovers.

Finally, a quick word about hygiene - yes, I know every article on this subject says it, but it really is best to keep feeders clean, with fresh food in them. To make this easy, I have two sets of hanging feeders so that every other week or so, I can bring in the empty one for a scrub, putting out the other one instead. This gives the feeders time to be properly cleaned and dried, while maintaining the “service” in my garden.
And yes, I have the joy of a constant stream of feathered visitors!


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Common newts in my pots again!

Again!

Here we are, middle of winter, not the traditional time for gardening but it's a nice mild day, so I decided to check over some of my "stock" plants, which will be ready for sale later in the year.

I tipped this one to see how the roots were coming along, and the answer is "quite nicely" but we appear to have a little friend in there as well.

Can you see him?

He's upside down, and slightly out of focus, but that orange thing is the underside of a common newt, head towards the top, tail hanging out over the side, and one poor little limb flung outwards in a despairing "WHY will she not let me SLEEP!" sort of gesture.

I am constantly amazed at the number of newts that I find in my garden, because when I say "garden" I mean my small front yard, which has no pond, no grass, no flower beds, no shrubs, nothing, you would have thought, to attract newts.  It is entirely shingle underfoot, and almost entirely covered with raised benches for my plants-for-sale.

In fact, here's a picture of it:

What look like long flower beds are the raised benches - spot the blue mushroom trays!

So why are my pots always full of newts?

I assume that they like the matrix of cover created by the pots - all the tops meet, so the predators can't get at them, but all the bottoms are narrower, so there must be a network of alleyways between the pots.

And, of course, I water them frequently so although there is no pond or soil, there is quite a lot of shade and dampness.

And whenever I find one, like this little fellow, I carefully put them back somewhere: so presumably the word has gone out, in newt circles, that my front yard is a superb winter hiding place with a kindly if somewhat annoying owner who will keep on moving things...

 

 

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Baby birds in the shrubbery.

Yes, it's nesting season, and I was clipping the lawn edges around the shrubbery the other day, when I distinctly heard the sound of little birds cheeping - but it was coming from close in front of me.

Two minutes of panther-like stalking around the shrubbery and I had located the nest: inside a garden sculpture!

There it is, "Dior", surrounded by Peonies and other shrubs, and emitting shrill cheeping sounds.

The parent birds - Great Tits - were shuttling to and fro while I worked my way along the border, and each visit was accompanied by hungry cheeping.

Here is a short video - you will need your sound turned up to hear them cheeping. I wasn't able to get a video of the adults because, as I hope you appreciate,  I was working at the time, so I couldn't take the time to stand there and wait for them. But they were in and out every couple of minutes, non-stop.

I have no idea why they have not been flooded out, as the sculpture is open at the top, and it has rained quite heavily in the last few days.

Hopefully, they will survive!

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The Mysterious Case of the Pawprint in the Brick...

Saw this amazing little paw-print recently:

Isn't that lovely?

And unusual?

It appears in a red-brick Georgian house, built around the middle of the C18th, and presumably a cat walked across the bricks in their forms, before they were baked in the kiln.

I assume it's a cat - something with pads, and retractrable claws, and it seemed about the right size for a cat.

The owner wondered what sort of animal would have six toes, but I told them I was fairly certain it was two footprints, one nearly on top of the other.

A lot of four-legged animals walk in a pattern called "tracking" or "tracking up" whereby on each side, the back foot is placed exactly where the just-lifted front foot was. If you watch them walking, you can see this lovely coordination, the front foot rises just fractionally before the back foot would have nudged it.

In horse riding, this is something which is part of daily training, ensuring that your horse tracks up properly, and doesn't slop along with the back hoofs not landing exactly where the front ones went. If you look at a run of hoofprints in soft ground, you can often see whether the horse was working properly, or slopping along, by looking for overlapping hoof prints.

None of my various riding instructors could ever tell me why we had to work on this, but I have always assumed that any four-legged animal can only see where the front two feet are going, so to avoid unnecessary injury to the back feet, they should be placed only where the front feet have safely gone.

So we could assume that this little paw print is a back foot overlying a front foot.

Or, the cat started to walk on the half-set bricks, felt its paw sink in, rocked back, then decided to go ahead anyway.

Who knows.

Update: just had another one come in!  Read all about it here...

Bird House Fortification

I love feeding the little birdies through the winter, it's a constant, daily joy to watch them coming to the bird feeder on cold mornings, while I am eating my breakfast.

Like most people, I prefer the "nice" birds: robins are always welcome, as are blackbirds, although they rarely fly up to the feeder, preferring to feed on the ground, as do the dunnocks (which look rather like sparrows, until you get used to them).

I love my chirpy cockney sparrers, although I'm seeing fewer and fewer of them as the years pass.

I used to get the "big flock" of about 18, and the "little flock" of seven or eight, in past years, and I would look out for them - but now I only get a few at a time.

Here are a couple of them, pretending to be blue tits on the fatball feeder.

Thrushes rarely come to my garden, which is such a shame as I would love a "tame" thrush to take care of the snails. I have a couple of frogs, who do a great job of eating all the slugs, but they don't make much impression on the snails.

Sometimes I even get the odd woodpecker,  here's one using his tree-climbing skills to hold the post, while he "makes a long neck" to get at the fat ball.


Occasionally I get wrens, I get lots of blue tits, the occasional great tit, and - my ultimate favourite - long tailed tits, which are about as cute as they get, and which seem to be rather short-sighted:  if the flock appears (you can hear a sweet, high-pitched peeping getting closer and closer, that usually means they are approaching) and I am in the garden, and stand still, they will fly all around me to get to the feeder.

Here's a couple of them, discussing how to get at the fat balls inside the squirrel-proof feeder.

"Go on, squeeze through there."

"I can't get in!"

"Yes you can, go on, you're nearly through, I'll give you a push."

"Oof!"

I bought this feeder in an effort to prevent the starlings scoffing everything in sight, and it worked - but the small birds were not particularly keen on it, either. I can't blame them, it does rather look like a cage, doesn't it?

My main problem, however, was with pigeons, those great, fat, bloated, rats of the skies. Have you seen their feet? *shudders* horrible things!  Collared doves are ok, at least they have a certain amount of grace, and you usually only get two of them at a time, but the pigeons were becoming a bit of a nuisance.

I tried various feeders - cages for fat balls, seed feeders, plastic globes, you name it - and they all had the same problem, which was that there would be a rain of "bits" all around and underneath them, which attracted the pigeons.

So I decided to go for a bird-house, a little hut on a central pole, as it would keep the feed off the ground, and would keep the rain of the feed. Which it did. But the pigeons would blunder their way inside it, then scoff the lot.

What to do?

The first step was to create some bars to keep the darned things out - using scraps of wood, and some of my home-grown canes, I created a "cage".

Here is the Mark I version: it was initially 100% successful at keeping the pigeons out, and the starlings as well,  but it appeared to be irresistible to a squirrel.

Look closely....

Yes, there he is, enjoying the bird food.

Ah well, I don't really mind squirrels, and at least he had the decency to just squeeze between the bars.

The starlings, however, took it as a challenge and learned to land on the roof, take hold of the projecting pegs, and pull the canes out. This allowed them inside, and the pigeons as well. Hmmmm.

Mark II: the canes were wedged tightly in place, apart from two at the front, to allow me to refill it.

Much better. No more starling ingress. However, the pigeons took to landing on the roof and waddling around.

This shouldn't really be a problem, but the are so fat that they shake the entire pole, and given the choice, I would not have them in the garden at all.

So how could I stop them landing on the roof?

Answer: more of the canes, cut short and stuck into another piece of scrap wood, at odd angles. I took the idea from commercial anti-bird-perching strips that you see on top of rafters in covered walkways.

Hah! Success!

It looks ridiculous, but now the pigeons are foiled from landing on it, as are the magpies.

(Memo to self: must tidy up the garden before taking pictures in it.)

So now I have dry bird food, no mess on the ground underneath, no pigeons, no starlings, and hopefully this winter I will have a good range of little birdies coming along to enjoy it! 

 

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