Monday 6 May 2013

Introducing wildlife to your plot.

Any one that has read my piece on slugs and my use of nematodes to combat them will know, although this is my first plot I am determined to garden as green as possible.  This has lead me to explore the encouragement of wildlife to my plot.  My first stage in this process was to sow flowers (edible ones at that) to encourage bees for fertilization and friendly bugs like ladybirds to keep populations of gardeners enemy bugs at bay.  My second was the introduction of a water feature complete with around about sixty tadpoles all growing up quickly into an army of slug killers. If this and the little bug house built on the side of my shed were not enough I joked the other day about building an army of hedgehogs to destroy the invading slimy crop eaters, well guess what?  Living at home and having two cats we leave bowls of cat food in our out house out at night for them.  Hearing some bizarre noise one evening last week I was amazed to see two hedgehogs making there home in said out house.  Being so close to a source of food makes a lot of sense but sharing with my two cats and living in my washing...not such a good idea.  Life maybe full of coincidences, that's not for me to say, but it seems it in this instance it was and I knew just where to re-home them.
  After stuffing enough dried straw, dried grass and enough leaf material to make the underneath of my shed a fire hazard we decided to release them yesterday just as the sun was coming down.  Because of the cats we had a cat box so transporting them was easy enough.  Watch the video its quite cool and I am assured by my partner and my kids that they are very cute, I don't know about that either I just know If any of my crops get eaten by slugs after all of this prevention....War!


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