Our woodpecker - at last

Well this is the best I could do - the woodpeckers (there are 2 of them it turns out) are rather shy and the merest zoom of a lens send them flying back down the valley to the wood.

Here he is caught pecking at the monkey nuts hanging from one of our plant supports in the border.

These nut rings have been brilliant - they last for ages as the birds have to work to get their food.

Warning - this post contains a photo of a dead mole.

Our approach to wildlife is very simple - if it was here before we were then we have to learn to live with it.

Hence we put up with hares (that nibble hedges), voles (that tunnel under growing plants), pheasants (that eat bulbs) and yes, moles (that turn the grass paths and beds into ripples). While most farmers I know are keen on wildlife and do a lot to nurture it, this latter foible is regarded with hilarity (and I suspect a little annoyance) by our farming neighbours who enthusiastically annihilate all moles with a variety of horrible methods. It is of course for a reason, while a mole to me means an unsightly hump and some nice friable soil to steal as potting compost, to our neighbours it means ruined silage as the soil mixes with the harvested grass.

Minou obviously feels the same. The photo above shows Minou the foreman instructing Jasmine to "keep digging" for a mole that he could obviously hear under the ground. The photo was taken at the beginning of a week of frenzied activity - cat issuing instructions, Jasmine digging until her claws hurt and the mole cheekily coming up behind them with 8 fresh hills. This took up most of their waking hours from last Monday.


This morning this is what we found on the lawn - a beautiful sheeny black mole with 2 telltale puncture marks on his neck. Mr Mole is no more. Minou is a great hunter (he usually catches 2 of everything, one for himself, one for Jasmine the sidekick) but is scrupulous about hunting when hungry and then eating his catch. This was something quite different - he just knew that mole was laughing at him.

I am very sad - it is very easy to be sentimental about such a stunningly beautiful animal. Katie had to be persuaded that a dead mole is not a suitable soft toy.

Really wild . . .

Sometimes I think that I give the wrong impression of our land. I concentrate in posts about the flat bit near the house, the bit that forms the cutting garden, the bit which takes up most of my time. I rarely mention the rest.

In reality we have about 4 acres here - around about 1 acre is flat - the house is built on this bit and we have put up a polytunnel and lots and lots of raised beds.

The rest of the land slopes behind this down across a small tussocky field then a swampy field and finally through a bluebell wood down to the Altquhir burn.

This whole area is completely untouched and has been for at least 20 years - it is where I go to be quiet and is why we bought the house. Today Zoe and her friend Jan went down to the woods to play on the tree swing - sitting on the river bank they watched 2 herons fishing in the river. It is a very special place.

It is at this time of year that the fields begin to come alive with flowers - dog violets under the hawthorn trees, cowslips in the grass banking between the deer fences, kingcups in the swamp. Soon there will be cow parsley and scabious, meadowsweet and elderflowers and bluebells, bluebells everywhere. Nothing I grow really matches up to these.

My favourite thing at the moment is to lie in the grass under a hawthorn tree looking up through the old twisted branches with their new fresh green shoots.

This is my 300th post - doesn't time fly.

Cloche questions answered.

I originally got these glass cloches - reproductions of C17th Dutch ones - because I wanted them for the garden but they got so many interested comments that I bought in enough to resell.

While I grow, make or commission most of our stock, we do sell commercially made vases, planters and the like so these fit into that category - no-one is going to think that I havea glassworks round the back of the tunnel.

As it is the first year that I have had them I couldn't answer any questions about how they stand up to the weather - well now I can. we have been down to -6 now and they are absolutely fine.

I assume that it is the shape that prevents frost damage - I imagine that it just slides off the sides. They don't keep the plants frost free but do make a couple of degrees of difference and keep the rain, snow and deer away. The parsley under the cloches is fine and green, the plants in the open are frosted to pulp.


The other question I got a lot of is - what can you do with them inside? I use them to keep the children's nature finds dust free and to elevate the pebbles, cones and nests into Victorian Naturalist territory.

But look at this page from Elle Decoration - British artist Polly Morgan is putting dead robins and mini chandeliers into bell jars and charging from £4000 for the results. this one is called A Thousand Years in Your Presence. Perhaps I should take Minou onto the staff and turn his kills into profit.

The varmints . . .

I took this morning off to hear Zoe read a poem out at the school's Scottish Assembly and then took Jasmine for a long walk as it was such a fantastic day.

This was the welcoming committee when I got home - 3 beautiful does in the field next door. It is the first time this year that I have seen them in the daylight.


Though I knew they were about. . . . They have actually been doing a fair amount of damage in the cutting garden - this photo is of some tulips shoots nibbled level with the ground.

Still, I couldn't possibly get someone in to shoot them - much as I like venison. They are beautiful creatures, in much better condition after the mild winter than they were this time last year.

They stop eating our plants once the grass and wild flowers begin to grow again in the fields.

I have stretched netting over the tulips- they will have raggy looking leaves but the flowers will be fine.

Signs of spring

While many fellow bloggers are celebrating their first snow of the season, I am rejoicing in the first signs of spring.

It is a much better day today in so many ways, the sun is shining and I have finished off a whole heap of half finished hearts and bags and boxed them up.

The reason that I am celebrating though is that my hares are back.

My computer is on a table facing out over a small smooth green hill, it is the terminal morain of Loch Lomond, a marker of where the loch came up to in the ice age. Now it is the morning habitat of the brown hares.

Every morning from now until April I shall be able to check my morning e-mails while hare watching. Come March they will spend hours boxing - this morning they were simply chasing each other around.

Hares and buzzards, are now the essence of the spring to me.

I wasn't quick enough to get a photo of the hares this morning so it is a basket of half finished lavender hearts with their labels ready to be stitched on.

Deer - again

Every year at about this time we get deer back in the garden - we never see them and I think that we must be on their regular January route. They always leave again by the end of February.

My suspicion is that they walk up the road and jump the gate rather than coming up from the woods.

Last night's dinner for them was the flat leafed parsley - they have nibbled the leaves off very delicately, leaving raggedy stalks. I didn't have time to sort it out properly so I have just plonked some cloches over the remnants in the hope that it will regrow.

This is my first photo with the new camera - as Euan said - "Did you not think to move the canes?". Or mow the grass? Or weed the parsley bed? At least most of the mud is blurry!