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Sally Nex

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Sally Nex

Tag Archives: sheds

Hasta la vista, ratties

24 Wednesday Sep 2008

Posted by sallynex in Uncategorized

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

allotment, cats, mice, pests and diseases, rats, sheds, sweetcorn

This is a cob on my sweetcorn the day before I got my two feral cats to keep down the rats and mice:

Sweetcorn is an irresistible favourite of all things verminous, and I’ve never yet managed to get any to maturity, even though I still plant it (more in hope than expectation). It always, always ends up like this – scoffed by either rats or mice, or both, before it even gets ripe.

Now this is how the rest of my sweetcorn looks, a couple of weeks after the cats were let out of the shed:


Oh, my… I am too excited for words. I think I may be about to harvest my first-ever home-grown sweetcorn cob after four years of growing the stuff.

I think it can be said that the cat as mousetrap experiment has worked. Outstandingly well.

(the cats are having a great time too… :D)

Meet my mousetraps

08 Monday Sep 2008

Posted by sallynex in Uncategorized

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

allotment, cats, mice, pests and diseases, rats, sheds

I don’t know why it is that none of those worthy tomes about growing things on allotments ever talk about mice and rats – but in my experience, these twin scourges are second only to slugs in terms of what damage they do to crops. This year their tally includes my entire early pea crop, eaten to the ground when just seedlings, and now the first of my sweetcorn cobs to ripen.

I’ve tried everything: humane traps (they laughed scornfully and nicked the peanut butter while holding the door open with their tails); home-made not-very-humane traps (sweet jars sunk in the ground – they find their way in and then can’t climb out. Trouble is, the rain gets in too and then they drown – I don’t hate them that much); and not-at-all-humane traps (the conventional kind: once again, scornful laughter, no peanut butter and no dead mousies).

So it’s time for the nuclear option. Meet my new mouse traps.

Mousetrap No. 1: aka Sweep. And…

Mousetrap No. 2: aka Sooty. This is about all I’ve seen of her so far – she hides under the soil sieve in the corner nearly all the time – and Sweep, though more courageous in that she’ll come out if you’ve got a tin of cat food in your hand, isn’t exactly trusting.

These are feral cats – I got them from the Cats Protection League after reading that they were very short of homes for these basically wild animals. They aren’t pets, which is of course what most people are looking for when they want to rescue a cat – so they need people with outhouses, barns, stables or in this case sheds on allotments who can look after them but don’t expect them to be very domesticated.

As far as I’m concerned, they’re working animals with a job to do. Doesn’t stop me being a bit soppy about them – they’re very cute as they’re only about 6 months old and have that kittenish look still – but I don’t try to stroke them. I let them out for the first time this weekend – until now I’ve been keeping them in the shed so they know where home is – and am now keeping my fingers crossed that a) they’ll come back and b) they’ll massacre the mousies. And I hope rats, and possibly even bunnies too. Oh, I may be an animal-lover, but where my veggies are concerned it’s war…..

Garden makeover: Shedding about #2

01 Monday Sep 2008

Posted by sallynex in Uncategorized

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

borage, cobnuts, garden makeover, hard landscaping, moving sheds, nettles, paving, problem areas, sheds

Guess what I spent my weekend doing…

After my little bit of inspiration over the twin evils of a shed in the wrong place and a nasty little problem spot, there was no point hanging around really so I got out the tools and got to work.

First job – dig the whole area out to a spade’s depth (getting rid of all that borage in the process) and put down a nice clean layer of weed suppressing membrane. Lo – the problem area is no more.

Next, after those nice people at Wickes delivered a load of building materials, it was barrowing a couple of inches of hardcore (actually the same stuff road builders use so it can’t be bad).

That was the (relatively) easy bit done – then I had another couple of inches of sand on top of that:

…and the tricky bit was getting the horribly heavy paving slabs down. These were recycled from the paving slabs that were alongside the shed already, which seemed like a good idea until I realised how damned heavy they were. They were the kind you use for pavements – great for settling down and not moving anywhere without a small bomb beneath them, awful if you do actually want to move them somewhere. I did my best – it wasn’t quite patio standard, but it was OK for a shed base, and looked pretty good by the time I’d finished.

Then the fun bit – ta-da! One minute the shed was over there – the next, it was over here!

The tarp is because we managed to tear the (already gently rotting) roofing felt while we were moving it, but no matter, we have another roll in the shed which we’ll finish it off with next week.

I’m dead proud that we got it all done – but don’t be deceived by the “before and after” pics above: this was a long, sweaty, difficult job, especially the moving-the-shed bit which involved a lot of swearing and entailed dismantling the entire building and reconstructing it over a period of several hours. However – it’s also a job well done: we discovered a rat’s nest underneath where the shed used to be, since they hadn’t gone to all this trouble and had just put the shed on fence posts laid on the ground. Ain’t no rats can get through this lot, I guarantee…!

Garden makeover: Shedding about

29 Friday Aug 2008

Posted by sallynex in Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

borage, cobnuts, garden makeover, nettles, problem areas, sheds

This is my shed.


Yeah, yeah, I know, well we can’t all have quirky interesting sheds. I’ve actually got another shed too, up at the allotment, which is both quirky and interesting so maybe it’ll find its way onto these pages before long just to prove this is Not My Style (honest).

Anyway. I inherited the shed with the garden, and as I was wittering on about recently, there were a lot of eccentric design decisions made by my predecessor in this garden – one of them being to place this shed plumb in the middle of the main view from the house. So when you look out of my kitchen window you see my lovely plants set against a gorgeous background of poo-brown shiplap.

Next bit. This is my Problem Area.

It’s actually right opposite the shed, a little further down, and all I can do with it is hack it back periodically as nothing will grow there. It’s under the deep shade of an overhanging cobnut tree (one of the more lovely aspects of my garden) and is a jungle of nettles, next door’s self-seeded pink buddleia and rampant borage. You quite often see this deceptively pretty plant sold both as plants and seed in garden centres, at which I invariably laugh hollowly and totter out weakly since I’ve been waging a running battle with it for nearly 7 years – mind you I’m winning… mwah ha ha ha….

Mmm. Well. Anyway. I have for quite a long time been eyeing the shed… then eyeing the Problem Spot… then eyeing the shed again… It’s an obvious solution. So today I started digging. You can just about see the fork (about to root out those bloody borage roots again) and the stakes marking out the spot in the picture above. It’s going to be a horrible job (the pic of the shed very wisely doesn’t include one of its contents – I don’t think I’ve seen the back wall since we moved in) but the results will be Step One in the great garden makeover. Wish me luck.

Waxing lyrical

07 Friday Mar 2008

Posted by sallynex in Uncategorized

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

garden history, Jenny Uglow, sheds, tools and equipment

When I’m not out in the garden, or writing about it, it seems I’m listening to things about it… This morning it was a little gem on Woman’s Hour, on Radio Four, that caught my attention. It was an interview with garden historian Jenny Uglow in her suspiciously neat-sounding shed (she could get inside it, along with a radio reporter, for a start).

Jenny’s delightful book, A Little History of British Gardening, is one of the treasures on my bookshelf. It’s full of interesting things, and so was her interview on garden tools – as regular readers will know, I’m a bit of an anorak where the tools of my trade are concerned.

Anyway, did you know, for example, that painting your tools blue keeps flies off? Or that one of the daily tasks for Victorian estate gardeners was squeezing ants?

The report also had a little ditty which I just have to share – I’m sure everyone else has come across it already, but I had the delight of discovering it for the first time:

“From where the old thick laurels grow along the toolshed wall
You find the tool and potting sheds, which are the heart of all.
The cold frames, and the hothouses, the dungpits and the tanks,
The rollers, carts and drainpipes with the barrows and the planks,

And there you’ll see the gardeners, the men and ‘prentice boys,
Told off to do as they are bid, and do it without noise;
For except when seeds are planted and we shout to scare the birds,
The glory of the garden, it abideth not in words.

Our England is a garden, and such gardens are not made
By singing, “Oh, how beautiful!” and sitting in the shade.
Far better men than we go out and start their working lives
In grubbing weeds from gravel paths, with broken dinner knives.”

I discover from Jenny’s book that this is actually by Rudyard Kipling – it’s called The Glory of the Garden. In case you’re interested (the internet is a wonderful thing… but it does also encourage you to go on a bit) there’s more:

“There’s not a pair of legs so thin, there’s not a head so thick,
There’s not a hand so weak and white, nor yet a heart so sick,
But it can find some needful job that’s crying to be done,
For the Glory of the Garden glorifieth every one.

Then seek your job with thankfulness and work till further orders,
If it’s only netting strawberries or killing slugs on borders;
And when your back stops aching and your hands begin to harden,
You will find yourself a partner in the Glory of the Garden.

Oh, Adam was a gardener, and God who made him sees
That half a proper gardener’s work is done upon his knees,
So when your work is finished, you can wash your hand and pray
For the Glory of the Garden, that it may not pass away!”

That’s quite enough of that – ed.

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