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!

Garden bird-watching round-up, 2017

The Spring 2018 issue of Nature’s Home, the RSPB members’ magazine, arrived in the post a couple of days ago with the form for the RSBB Big Garden Birdwatch which takes place over the last weekend in January. I take part in this every year, although for the last two years I have had nothing to report as my front garden received a grand total of no avian visitors during the one hour I had designated for the survey (despite the various options that were available on the feeder), and back in 2015 two Ring-necked Parakeets who scared everyone else away. But one hour on a January weekend doesn’t tell the full story.

The bird-feeder in the front garden, situated so that it can be seen from the armchair in the corner of the lounge, actually gets a nice range of visitors. Over the past year, I have seen four kinds of tit (Blue, Coal, Great, Long-tailed) and two types of pigeon (Feral, Wood) on it, as well as Chaffinches, Robins, the odd Carrion Crow and the very occasional Greater-spotted Woodpecker. Ground-feeders have included Blackbirds and Dunnocks (and more pigeons), while I’ve seen Starlings and a Redwing perched in the tree.

Less welcome have been the squirrels, and I have tried various tricks to deter them. I thought that I had hit on a winning squirrel-deterring method by greasing the pole with some WD-40, and the resulting attempt by a squirrel to climb up the pole was admittedly hilarious. But then, of course, after several attempts enough of said lubricating oil had been wiped off to ensure a successful ascent, so an upturned plastic flower-pot with a hole in the bottom was deployed instead. I’m pleased to report that no squirrels have been seen on the feeder since.

Oh, and the parakeets visit too. Interesting birds, Ring-necked Parakeets. They’re not a native species to Britain, of course – but they have been a visible (and vocal) presence in the London area for a few decades now and are very well-established. Their exotic brightness has led to a couple of rather fanciful urban myths about how they got here; that the first pair in London were released at some point in the late Sixties by either Jimi Hendrix or Mick Jagger, or that the first ones escaped from Shepperton Studios during the filming of The African Queen back in 1951. There are a few question-marks over the extent to which they have affected native species (are they taking nest-sites from Lesser-spotted Woodpeckers, whose numbers are in decline?), although any queries about how a species from India manages to survive the winters here should be directed to the fact that their range includes the Himalayas; these birds may look tropical, but they can do cold. And, as they have shown, they are highly adaptable.

Brightening up the garden

On a Sunday lunchtime in London, what better thing to do than visit the flower market at Columbia Road? The main part of the market is on Columbia Road itself, a parade of Victorian shops off the Hackney Road. The market stalls are located in front of the shops, and the big crowds mean that it can get very crowded as everyone’s trying to walk through the narrow space in the middle.

We squeezed in among the crowd as the various sellers tried to attract attention by shouting about how their flowers were “fourpaaandabunch” and “freeefratenner”. We went for some early spring flowers – miniature daffodils, irises and snowdrops – along with bulbs for bluebells, crocuses and anemonies. Those last ones look like dried pellets of some sort. “You’ll need to soak those overnight,” we were told.

A couple of days later, I was out planting them in the front garden. There’s a part by the wall where the ivy wasn’t entirely cleared, so that job came first, along with cutting down a couple of bushes that had got out of control (one of which I hadn’t bothered with last year; it’s now a set of stumps) and some weeding in the flower-bed in front of the house. Let the 2016 gardening project commence!

The front part, which has some ground-cover that itsn’t grass but which can stay because it’s ground-cover, now has the flowers and the bulbs, apart from the anemonies which are in the flower bed. The front garden’s looking bright already, and soon it’ll look brighter still.

At the back, some vegetables have already been sown while the rosemary and mint plants have been trimmed back. Next to those are some radish seeds in the ground, while the black plastic troughs have been sown with broad beans and peas – in time, these will hopefully work their way up the trellises.