The coronavirus diary, or things to do at home: gardening and birdwatching

What with the weather being so nice, we’ve been devoting some of our time to our garden. Coronavirus or no, we were planning to plant a few things in our vegetable patch anyway – we always do! We were lucky with our timing, though, paying a visit to the garden centre to buy some vegetables for planting the weekend before the government advised against non-essential travel.

It’s been interesting to see how there has been a push (well, a few feature articles in the papers) about encouraging people their own food in these uncertain times – I suspect that if people have really gone for this in a big way (and it looks as though people have, echoing perhaps the ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign during the War), it’s probably as much about doing something (a something that, it must be said, does appear to have some positive mental health benefits) as it is to make sure we’ve got something to eat if we have problems with the food supply chain later on.

We’ve planted carrots, cabbage and kale in the main bed, in addition to which there are some onion plants which have somehow survived the winter, some asparagus plants doing their thing at the back (who knows, with those?) and the ever-present rhubarb plant. 

Then we have some more kale in a couple of the bigger pots and lettuce in three other pots. 

The troughs have peas and mange-touts growing in them, although at present these have yet to see the light of day!

On a visit to Homebase just before Britain went into lockdown (the primary purpose of which was to get a new gas-bottle for the barbecue), I also picked up a little bag of seed potatoes which I held off planting in the compost-bags until last weekend. Not that it takes particularly long, but I thought I’d spread the work out. Last year, we did get some potatoes but they were mostly on the small side, probably because we planted too many in the bags so this year I deliberately planted less.

A problem we’ve had in the past is one that many gardeners face – slugs. We still had some slug pellets in the shed from last year and they were put down as soon as I’d planted our vegetables, but that was the extent of our supply. Therefore, I’ve fallen back on a more old-fashioned method which may or may not work – eggshells. Opinion as to whether or not these actually work in terms of deterring slugs is mixed on the Internet, but in the absence of anything else right now it’s got to be worth a shot, right?

Inside, we have some micro-greens on the windowsill which are growing at differing speeds; some of these clearly do better than others.

And what of the birds? I was enthused by the RSPB’s new Breakfast Birdwatch initiative (encouraging people to take some time to watch the birds when they’d usually be commuting and/or doing the school run) but a consequence of not having to go to work at the moment is that I have been sleeping in for much longer than I usually do – such is life on furlough-leave! But I’ve still been keeping an eye out for feathered visitors to the garden – as I type I can see out to the feeder on our front lawn – and over the last few days I have seen a wide range of birds either visiting us or flying overhead: pigeons of the wood and feral varieties, ring-necked parakeets, starlings, blackbirds, blue tits, great tits, goldfinches and the occasional wren. The nuts are popular with birds of all sizes, but I am particularly impressed by the agility of the parakeets!