A spot of gardening

It's that time of year when the garden gurus tell you to stay off the lawn and put your feet up in front of the fire with the seed catalogues to plan the next growing season.  When you have chickens and a workshop at the bottom of the garden, that advice is useless, and the best one can do is to ensure that you don't keep walking on the same bit each time (handy tip - put plastic garden chairs over routes that have got a bit soggy so you have to walk round them and thus let the grass recover, plus if the chair is white, you can see it in the dark and avoid falling over it!).

Round here, if you are in the country and don't have fences, you find that enthusiastic wildlife will do what it can to scarify the lawn.  I'm not talking here about the gentle progging that a green woodpecker or a blackbird will do searching for worms and insects, nor in the Southern Hemisphere that a friendly Ibis will do for reasons that the Southern Hemisphere will have to provide.  No I am talking serious earth works here - see below!

 

This delightful sight met our eyes at one of John's gardens near the river before Christmas.  The owner was concerned that someone had raided his grounds for wild cyclamen.  While they are prolific there, the French are not into nicking them as they are so widely available everywhere; they just enjoy them where they are.  Indeed our lawn is starting to sprout a number of patches of cyclamen due to the lawn mice that find seeds, bury them and then either lose them or get eaten by the cats themselves.  I think I am up to a dozen such cyclamen plants, and ours is not a huge garden.

So what had done all that damage, if it wasn't itinerant pilfering peasants?  The ultimate vandal was to blame.  A beast that, if it sees a fine lawn, just has to go and make a mess of it.  A beast that trashes woodland roads and verges (and sometimes cars too) and is growing in numbers in our part of the world despite the huge numbers of hunters that try to track it down.  The wild boar is a very shy animal - I have only ever seen a live one once, and that was living at a farm rescue centre.  John has seen a couple at night but only fleetingly.  We have seen their traces in the damage however and know exactly who to blame!

Foot prints and tusk marks - could the clues be any clearer?

 
 

Comments

[Anne Donald]

Oh - I don't like the idea of having wild boar in the garden - unless it was in the form of tasty sausages!!

[Jane]

We are free from the not so little darlings as we are on the edge of a village, it is those in remote locations that seems to suffer. Another client had a meadow that was regularly raided by boar, but then later they did manage to keep them out with a post and rail fence with large gauge mesh tacked to it and nobbly fat logs of leylandii on the outside against the wire. The logs were a deterent against just rooting up the wire mesh, due to the nobbles and due to the smell and resin in the wood.

Having said that, most years around here there is a story of a boar going mad and getting into some form of building (I remember a school and a conservatory at least) and trashing them before being shot. A bit like urban foxes in London, there are too many of them and food gets scarce in winter.