Monday 30 March 2015

the gardeners strike back

The Systems Administrator has finished the anti-rabbit gate, a piece of plant support netting held between battens, with a loose curtain overlapping the bottom batten so as to take up the unevenness of the drive.  It is ingeniously hinged at one end and hooks on to a bolt at the other. Constructing the wooden hinge required a fair amount of bodging, but having one saves me having to try and hook both ends of the batten up at once.  That would be a task designed to drive anybody mad, especially performed after dark or in the rain.  A half gale blew through the entire process, and the SA's residual cold had developed into a headache by the end of it.  It is a very fine rabbit gate, though.  I shall take great pleasure in shutting it behind me as I go out this evening, though opening it and shutting it again when I get back may be less fun as by then it is forecast to be raining heavily.

We've had the wildlife camera set on the gravel where my poor bulbs got eaten for the past forty-eight hours.  It revealed Black and White Alsatian Killer Cat passing at speed, having evidently clocked the infra-red camera and not liked it, and at around midnight Our Ginger who saw the camera and paused in front of it to beam.  He does go out at night, it seems, just not until after we've gone to bed and the non-stop feline party has ended for the day.

There was also a small rabbit, just the one, which first appeared not long after dusk.  The SA was surprised at how early in the night the camera picked it up, but I thought that rabbits were crepuscular animals.  Which said, I've seen them running round the neighbour's field and the grass by the lettuce farm reservoir quite late into the night, when I've been coming back from evenings out.  In the old days when our cats were fierce the rabbits always used to jinx left or right at our entrance, though, never going in.  Not any more, alas.

There is the nasty possibility that by now we have them living in the garden.  The camera is set on the gate for now, to see how it performs, but after that I want to move it to the back garden and discover the terrible truth.  Both the Cardamine quinquefolia I got from the Chatto gardens and planted in their obscure corner only a few days ago have been eaten to the ground, as has the existing plant which was flowering, and is why I noticed the damage in passing as my brain registered that the splash of pink in that corner was missing.

I'd actually gone to the bottom of the garden to prune the hydrangea 'Annabelle', which is one of those that you can take down to a short framework in March if you want to without losing a year's flowers.  It tends to be a floppy thing, and I thought that shorter might be better.  Once I was in the back garden I spent the rest of the day applying Strulch.  Originally I'd thought it would be too windy, or rather originally I'd expected it to be raining, which is what the forecast for Monday said yesterday, but by today the forecast had changed and the rose beds seemed reasonably sheltered. The leaves of the bulbs and perennials are enlarging day by day, and the sooner all the beds are Strulched the better. They are not  all going to be Strulched, though, unless I buy some more, as I can tell from looking at what I've done and what's left to do that I'm at least half a pallet short.

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