Making friends with wildlife

Since our wildlife is in trouble and many species including hedgehogs, garden birds, frogs and toads are in decline, it makes sense to try and help a bit by setting aside an area of garden for them.

Our back garden is where the current bird feeders are, in a corner by a rather rampant shrub. Today, Gavin gave the shrub a severe haircut and the corner was opened up in the first step to it becoming the wildlife corner.

Plans for this corner are:

A hedgehog house
A new bird table and the current hanging feeders
Planting of a carex pendula a kind of sedge, to provide cover for insects and small animals
Large stones and pieces of wood to provide more shelter
Planting of wild flowers attractive to bees and other insects, e.g. borage (which also has edible flowers)
Plants grown from dropped bird seed (last year we had a patch of barley and oats 'planted' by the bird people!)

New bird table painted today!



Frog visiting the pond

In other parts of the garden, there are also:

Two bird boxes
Two bird baths
An insect house
A small pond in a wooden barrel planter
A buddleia (butterfly bush)
And other plants attractive to bees and insects such as Hebe and Californian Lilac.

The pond was already here when we moved here. The bird and insect box were inexpensive, £3 each from Morrisons. We've tried to locate them near trees, and the bird box is also in a quiet place where we don't have to walk too much.

Currently we have these visitors (that we know of):

Frogs
House sparrows
Dunnock
Collared doves
Great and Blue tits
Chaffinches
Greenfinches
Blackbirds

Last year there were a lot of bees on the lilac tree which had the most amazing blossom, and we're hoping to see this again. Haven't seen a hedgehog (sadly these are in decline) although the previous owners said one did visit the garden. Hopefully if our garden becomes more wildlife friendly, we'll see more visitors. The wildlife certainly helps. At my previous house on a modern estate with little wildlife, I had a terrible slug and snail problem and had to relocate up to 20 snails a day in Spring! Here, there seems to be a bit more balance and lots of empty shells near stones where the blackbird has been at work.



The cherry tree

As well as creating a wildlife area, this weekend, the cherry tree was planted in the front for maximum sunshine. Can't wait for the leaves on all the trees to start coming out! At least there's some snowdrops and daffodils peeping out now, signs that although it's still very cold, spring is on its way.



Snowdrops



First daffodil

Progress in the front garden

There was enough sun today to get some more work done and the raised bed builder was available!




Available for hire, chainsaw and all!

The first bed was finished off and with another eight half round fencing posts, a new square-shaped bed was constructed. It was finished very quickly. The tapered ends were cut off and used as the supports inside the bed to hold it together. They also went into the ground to prevent it from moving. 






 Holly came out to help with filling the original bed. We used a mixture of home-made compost, bags of peat-free shop bought stuff, bags of topsoil and some spent compost from last year. We'll use up the remainder of the 'organic' pelleted chicken manure that I bought years ago, but won't be buying this again. Instead I'm going to use seaweed and grow green manures (clover, alfalfa) to make the garden completely GMO free and organic. Although the chicken manure says 'organic,' I'm not sure where it came from or what they were fed on, or indeed the welfare standards so have decided not to get it again. A lot of our livestock in the UK are now being fed genetically modified soya.

 

More front lawn is covered, not sure what the neighbours think! This is good because our lawn is a pain to mow. It's full of moss and neighourhood cats use it as a toilet. I can see more of it will be gone before long!

Next we're going to install an arch to grow runner beans up and the cherry tree is also going to be planted in the front.

Inside the house, seeds are now planted in the propagator and potatoes are chitting on the window sill. It's still a bit cold, but I've planted some radishes under plastic in the back garden, just to get something going out there! I can't wait to see everything growing in the next few months.

 

 

 



Time to stand and stare

Snow fell yesterday, transforming the landscape in just a few hours. It's numbing beauty quietened the landscape as if time had paused and invited a moment of immersion in a new purged landscape of blue, white and silver.

Sometimes it's hard to stop, but with very little energy, I had to take a day off. A day off in my holiday... perhaps we beat ourselves up too much, always needing to be productive. It's good to have off days too.

We live in a destructive machine age, where time is something to beat. We're always running out of time, time is against us, time is not on our side. Our language speaks of an embattled relationship with something that does not actually exist. People say time is speeding up. It is, we are creating this speed through our own rushing.

The Gregorian calendar dates back to Pope Gregory XIII in a decree signed on 24 February 1582, although in the UK it was not adopted until much later (1752). The idea was to solve mathematical problems with extra days rather than to be in tune with the cycles of nature. According to Mayan scholar Jose Arguelles our calendar fails to balance solar and lunar elements and ignores natural cycles and creates an imbalance that has far reaching effects. He argues for a thirteen month calendar (13 months of 28 days with a day out of time for celebration and forgiveness of debts at the end of each year), which aligns with the moon's cycles around the earth as well as the solar cycle. As he says:

'Condition the mind to an irregular standard and the mind will adjust to disorder and chaos as normal aspects of existence. Our civilisation is based on false time and artificial time has run out for humanity.'

According to the Dr Deepak Chopra our loss of connection due to artificial timing also causes us to age faster. However there is no universal agreement on exactly what calendar could be adopted to update the one we have, though perhaps in the long term it will change, even though it seems unlikely now, we were after all, following the Julien calendar of Julius Caesar less than 300 years ago (in the UK).

Calvin Luther Martin writes:

'Our ancestors first became enslaved to the clock when they began systematically enslaving plants and animals in what scholars politely call the agricultural (or Neolithic) revolution.'

If you don't think that time dominates your life, try being aware for a day at exactly how it does just that. I find myself saying 'I don't have time,' all the time. I look at the clock and think, 'Oh no, it's late already and I haven't done....' The calendar holds together the fabric of our society, throw it away and our civilisation would descend into chaos, change it for a better calendar and could we find ourselves feeling more synchronised to cosmic and earthly cycles and somehow better in ourselves? It's food for thought.

Living out of time has a certain appeal. Letting the days and seasons announce themselves. Sometimes when we don't have to be anywhere, we can feel something of the magic of not knowing or caring whether it is Wednesday or Thursday. One of my favourite books is Thoreau's classic 'A Cabin in the Woods,' where he wrote of his time living out of normal society in a wooden cabin he built himself. It is noticeable that he wrote of his two year stay in a non-chronological way. This slightly irritated me at first, until I understood why.

'As he made no compromise with Time, Time kept out of his way, and only signed at a distance because he could not overcome him.' (Thoreau)

Time here, sounds like Death, which I suppose it is in a sense, or at least it is due to our fear of death that we try to fight against non-existent time.

Yesterday I tried not to fight with time. I let the snow stop me. I'm on holiday anyway, so why not abandon schedules and feelings of 'I've wasted time, I've got nothing done.' We are human beings, not human doings. Today is a day out of time, to be creative, to muse, listen to music, potter, plant a few seeds ready for spring, feed the birds, walk in the snow and let it fall without recrimination.

Dylan Thomas's lyrical poem 'Fern Hill' is about the gradual hold that time takes on us as we grow up. The final verse here (but it's worth reading the whole thing):

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

Would you like to live out of time for a while? You have done it before, remember when you were very young and you didn't know when your birthday was? In the halycon days when the grownups took care of worrying things like time.

 

Making a start

The altitude here is about 400 foot in the foothills below the Denbigh moors in a small Welsh village. Aspect is important. Our front garden faces south-south easterly and so has the most potential for sun-loving crops. The back is more northerly and the side, where the patio is, faces in a westerly direction.

Front garden has a few shrubs and trees and a rather mossy lawn

 Side garden is part patio, lawn and shrubs with a buddleia and a lovely Californian Lilac

Back garden, more shady as it faces north, has compost bin, bird feeder, lawn and path

Last year, my partner installed two raised beds, made cheaply from half fence posts which cost only £1.35 at the local timber merchant. He also dug an ugly shrub up from the bed by our kitchen door which became another bed where I grew potatoes and leeks. In fact we still have a few leek and broccoli plants which being hardy, have survived sub zero temperatures. The organic purple sprouting broccoli is particularly impressive because it also survived a devastating caterpillar attack (we used netting but were too late). It's all a learning experience though and we'll do better, hopefully, next year.

Our purple sprouting broccoli - growing through the winter

Our Leeks - Good winter survivors

 

This is all very nice, but not enough! So we have bought another twelve of the half-round fence posts and created a new, quite compact 'L' shaped raised bed to complement the bed already in the front. This only cost £19 for the wood, though it'll need another two posts costing £21.70 altogether to finish it off. In addition, I've dug up the adjacent area (front of the picture below) where some straggly plants were not doing very much and have prepared that for a potato crop. For £12 I bought some bags of topsoil, although dearer than ordering in bulk, I was impatient to start and this stuff was good quality. I sometimes find the topsoil that comes by the ton, isn't quite so good quality, having ordered some for my school, it turned out to be heavy clay (difficult for small hands to dig), not to mention the bit of broken glass that was in there. However to be fair, a previous order from the same firm was quite good. I may yet resort to ordering in bulk, depending on how this project unfolds. We now have four beds, but are already thinking it won't be enough!

 

After a few hours on the internet, I've ordered a lot of seeds and am excited about planting much more this year. As well as potatoes and leeks, we're trying for peas, kale, onions, beetroot, spinach, salad leaves, tomatoes, dwarf french beans, climbing beans, courgette, squashes and herbs, which are the things that are most likely to be eaten. We've also got two apple trees (one is being trained against the wall as an espalier), a sweet cherry tree and blackberries which will hopefully yield this year. Although it's still cold (1 degree centigrade), I'm going to start planting indoors, time to sign off and dig the propagator out of the garage.

 

New area (this week so not quite finished) in front garden (less lawn to mow!)






Be the change you want to see

On the 21st December 2012 I was projectile vomiting into the toilet. Exhausted after a long school term, I spent that night sleeping on the couch until I woke at 5am and noticed that I'd left the Christmas tree on. For some reason I remember that night, perhaps because there was a sense of unreality (being ill and all that) and since I'd been reading Daniel Pinchbeck's '2012 The Year of the Mayan Prophecy,' I had some creeping sense that instead of the world ending, a cycle had ended. The end of this paradigm, where as Pinchbeck puts it, we are a 'culture obsessed with acquiring wealth, goods and status....entire lives and enormous expulsions of energy could seem to be misdirected or even wasted,' and how we may have: 'endless energy to expend on the trivial and treacly, the sports statistic or shoe sale, but no time to spare for the torments of the Third World for the mass extinction of species, to perpetuate a way of life without a future...'

What could I do? Always the feeling of helplessness. I give to a few charities, sign petitions and support various campaigns but there is a sense of being a powerless spectator at times.

Instead I want to be actively involved in the truth of what this world really is. What is the reality behind this matrix we have constructed in the West? And how can I be more actively involved in the spiritual and ecological reality of this earth that we all inhabit and whether we feel it or not, are vitally interconnected with?

During these past few winter months, I've read about Mayan prophecies, Shamans, Native Americans and urban homesteaders amongst many things and feel the need to do something practical. The government isn't listening and we need to show them where we want to go rather than helplessly moaning about their perceived ignorance. As the future holds possibilities of collapse and many of our governments can offer little more than 2-3 days of food should disaster strike, it may be time for us to look to our local communities as the way to secure our future survival. Imagine how we could improve our food security, just by growing some food in our own back gardens and yards, or if we don't have much space, even a few containers and window boxes is a good start. There are new ideas such as vertical growing that maximise space, and what about digging up some of that useless lawn. You can't eat grass after all! I've been growing a small percentage of my own fruit and vegetables, but now it's time to increase that and realise the potential of an average-ish UK garden.

Red sky morning... a new beginning :O)