I wondered if this might be a good time to write a bit about crop damage by some of the other members of the allotment community – not the two legged oned – but the insects, mammals and molluscs who were there before us and will still be around, hopefully, long after we’ve been recycled ourselves. So this post comes in two parts. In part one I’ll try to give some pointers to what might be causing the damage; but in part two I’ll be pondering on whether we’ve got our attitude towards what we choose to call pests completely wrong.
I’ll start with the causes first, and there are dozens of excellent books that will explain a lot better than me what’s causing the problem – so I’ll just give some very general pointers. The biggest of the problems comes with deer (we don’t have them here, but we had as many as a dozen at a time in our last garden – happily scrumping apples as we watched in amazement from the bedroom window. Deer are heavy duty munchers of grass, but also of leaves and bark, so they’re a bit of a menace in an orchard. The only preventative is good strong fencing.
Next comes badgers. Badgers love sweetcorn and so if you grow it you’ll have to engage in hand to hand combat with them and they will invariably win because they tend to be about in the darkest hours of the night. You can always tell when a badger’s been in the corn because they smash it down flat – as in the right hand photograph in order to bring the corn within reach so they can eat the cobs whole.
Rats (left hand photo) are brilliant climbers who love the stuff just like the badgers. However they’re much lighter and climb up for a feed, eating just the grains and leaving the empty cobs on the stalk. While strong fencing might work for a badger – although I once watched a big boar throw himself at a newly built stock fence until it fell down – rats will burrow under it or climb over it. Since there are a lot of rats in the world; and since they are admirably smart; traps – however expensive or fiendish – tend only to work once and since rats breed like rabbits, in a manner of speaking, you’re stuffed anyway.
Squirrels don’t seem to attack corn, but they love broad beans which they shell tidily and extract the beans from the pods which they stack tidily on the side. Rats also like them but they just nibble into the pods, wandering from plant to plant in a thoughtfully destructive way.
Mice love seeds and seedlings and often you don’t even notice they’ve visited until a tray full of seeds fails to germinate. My problem with all of these nuisances is that I’ve increasing come to believe that they’re all – even rats – rather beautiful and simply doing what nature intends. It’s not always possible for us to understand nature and its huge “brain” stuffed with trillions of connected species, and our scientific, mechanistic mindset encourages us to think we can remove all these irritants by fair means or foul. But removing a pest from a hugely complex system is like removing a wire from a signal box. It might take a while but sooner or later a consequence will emerge.
Mentally declaring war on insects, molluscs and mammals is a miserable attitude to live with and, worse still, it won’t solve the problem because on balance they’ve all got their own place in the grand dance, predating on some living beings and being predated on by others. I was leaning on the fence looking at our pond earlier today and the most gloriously beautiful dragonfly stopped by, idling with its twin pairs of wings like a Chinook helicopter but in a far less warlike way. Just below it was a hoverfly of a type I’ve never seen before. They may well have been eyeing up the water boatmen on the surface.
Yesterday as we came to unlock the greenhouse I spotted a sleek rat scarpering away along the top rail of the compost heap, and I realised I had no thought of taking its life. It’s a nuisance – get over it!
So where it’s important, and likely to be effective, we’re evolving ways of keeping the nuisances away from the crops we want to preserve. Our leeks, for instance, have been felled by allium leaf miner three years on the trot so this year they’ve spent their entire lives under fine insect mesh – and at last we’ve got a crop. On our allotment it’s not worth even trying to grow cabbages without keeping the white butterflies and the pigeons out. Protection is so much much better than spraying and damaging the very soil that gives us healthy plants.
I’ve increasingly come to think we should make peace with nature and stop throwing our weight around in the way that’s brought the earth close to catastrophe. We had some corn this year – it was the best we’ve ever grown – and between them the badger and the rats took the rest. I bet they’re looking sleek and plump; fit to survive the winter. However much harm they do it pales into insignificance when compared with the damage that we as a species have done over the past couple of centuries.
Tomorrow is the equinox, when this charged season of late summer comes to an official end. Late August is always a bit depressing because the season has given all that it can and the allotment is looking a bit tired. But with the equinox we clear away the remains of the last season and start feeding, mulching and planning as we sow the winter crops in the polytunnel. The compost heaps are working flat out and every minute we don’t spend on the allotment is spent in the kitchen, cooking and preserving ready for the winter. We too, like the badgers and the rats, need to be ready for the months ahead. Today we made 5 jars of cucumber relish with our final crop of blimps. We don’t throw them away we just remove the tough seeds and the skin and make a lovely condiment; flavoured with celery seeds, dill seeds, saffron, onion and peppers. Bring on the Boxing Day feast I say !
