The problem with squirrels

 @JacobiJayne  #feedthebirds


As well the Woodpecker "problem"  I talked about in my last post, we also have a real problem with squirrels. Our wood is home to a number of grey squirrels and, as long as that is where they stay, we adopt a "live and let live" attitude to them. Indeed we are amused and entertained by their antics. One year, though,  the numbers multiplied and suddenly they were eating all the apples, all the growing crops and even chewed into the polytunnel. That year we had to resort to live trapping and shooting some to restore the balance, but usually we all get along together. The squirrels do however love to eat the bird peanuts and seed and will chew up any vulnerable feeder to get to the food. I use squirrel proof metal Droll Yankee nut feeders which work well but have not, so far, come across any squirrel proof seed feeders. I have been resigned to just regularly buying complete new feeders to replace the damaged ones.

So when I was contacted by conservation products company Jacobi Jayne & Co to see if I would like to try out some of their products I immediately said yes.  I had a lovely chat on the 'phone with Graham from Jacobi Jayne about squirrels, gardening, birds and wildlife in general and I outlined my problem with squirrel damaged feeders. As a result I was offered two different seed feeders to try;  one of which says it is 100%  squirrel proof and the other a general purpose easy to clean feeder but in which all the parts can be replaced.

When the parcel arrived I realised I had also been sent a couple of big feeder hanging hooks and a 12.5 kg bag of Special Mix bird food, so thanks Graham!

The One feeder is a standard looking bird feeder but is very easy to take apart for cleaning ( it is a very good design) and I can see it would be easy to just replace any chewed or damaged parts so I was impressed even before I hung it out.

The Squirrel Buster was easy to assemble and I could immediately see how hard it would be for a squirrel to get at the seed!

 Fill up the inner hopper

 Add the outer mesh cover - here it is open for birds to eat the seed

but if a squirrel tries to get to the food  (Compostman's hand pretending to be the squirrel, here)  the extra weight of the squirrel makes the cover slide down and blocks the feed. What a brilliant idea.

These two new feeders went out on to the bird table along with the Droll Yankee nut feeder - the birds immediately began to use the new feeders, and as usual the hens hung around waiting for the dropped seed (sigh)

 

You can buy Jacobi Jayne conservation products in shops or online at their website Living with birds
There is a wealth of useful information on the site and they sell lots of other products for wildlife. The Squirrel Buster retails at £24.95, The One feeder will be launched in mid June and the medium sized one (above, lhs of the pole) I am using would sell for £11.49.

I haven't seen a squirrel try the Squirrel Buster yet but I bet it will find it hard to get at the feed. I will keep you posted and try to get a photo if I can!


Disclaimer. I was sent the feeders, a couple of hanging hooks and a bag of seed to review. All opinions are my own.

Homegrown food - taking stock of what we still have and looking forward to new stuff

If you look on the right hand side of my blog you will see a list of the homegrown food we still have in stock and are eating now. I have been asked by a few people what we have left, so I thought I would make a list. Its getting less each day, but I was quite pleasantly surprised when I did a quick stock take! I am not sure we could live on it but it makes a welcome contribution to the diet.

The first of the new season salad, herbs and such like are coming through fast now, and when I see new bean and pea plants growing fast I know we are not far away from eating them, fresh, again! I have carrots growing in tubs inside the polytunnel and spuds in bags with haulms up the top of the bags! ( so new spuds will be on the menu in another month...) and the broad beans are doing well in the garden. I have turnips to succesionally sow, asn the usual salads, spring onions and radishes will go in as and when a bit of land becomes available throughout the summer, and in pots in the Polytunnel.




The plum trees are smothered with blossom and as long as we have no frosts in the next few days, should have a bumper crop of fruit this year. The soft fruit has lots of flower buds forming as well.





I have all my seed potatoes in the ground, now, and am actually ahead of myself thanks to the good weather! (shhh, don't tempt fate!) the parsnips are all in as well.

I just need to get the onion sets in the main garden, I have overwintered shallots and onions in some raised beds, but need to plant more, oh and carrots, in between the alliums. The garlic, planted in December, is going well.

I have peas and beans of all sorts shooting up, all the tomatoes, peppers, aubergines etc are now good sized plants and are out in the cold frames inside the polytunnel, where they keep nice and warm at night with a lid over them and get fresh warm air in the daytime without the lid.

I still need to put some melon and cucumber seeds in the heated propagator ( now I have some room!) then when they come up (in a day or two!) next will be the courgettes and then squashes of various sorts, which will go in during the next week or so.... I find these grow so fast that I tend to leave them until about this time in April, otherwise they grow into huge leggy plants when it is still too cold to pot them out in the Polytunnel.

This year I am going to try, yet again, to grow some Kale and Purple Sprouting, plus a few other brassicas...we will construct a METAL cage which, hopefully, will stop the squirrels from eating every last shred of them. So I have been planting various brassicas and they, too, are in the Polytunnel.

Looking at my "fresh food" list, I DO need some brassicas to fill that "hungry gap", about now....!

Phew! I hadn't realised quite how many plants I have growing, I am not surprised the house and porch and polytunnel all look like mini forests at the moment :-)

I do feel worryingly ahead of it all at the moment...but I probably shouldn't have said that ( she whispers) as we will now have non stop hail storms for the next month, or a plague of locusts......or something....I keep expecting to find a whole clutch of seeds I should have sown in January , but didn't ;-)


So...what do the rest of you have left over from last year? and will you be growing more, or less of anything in particular this year?

Weighing and counting the produce

Normally I just have an idea visually of how much food there is in the garden and polytunnel and adjust our eating habits accordingly. We are usually (apart from last year) self sufficient in apples, plums, berries of various sorts, spuds, onions, spinach, leeks, green beans, tomatoes, herbs, salads, courgettes and parsnips, by a mixture of growing them and freezing/bottling them for later use. We also grow most of our requirements for peppers, aubergines, cucumbers etc in the summer

AND I grow and dry herbs, rose petals and lavender ( for both culinary AND cosmetic/pot pourri uses!)

But after the disaster that was last summer, where we had no store spuds or onions, we had to buy a lot of fruit and veg and I didn't like it one bit. It also made me realise how much I take for granted being able to harvest what I want and eat it half an hour later, or eat our own frozen french beans in winter, or get a spud from the store to have Baked spud for a quick lunch.


So....I have started to weigh some of the stuff I harvest, especially from the polytunnel. I am NOT going to do it for the spuds from the garden at the moment, its just silly as there are too many! We have been eating entirely our own spuds since the start of June, but I WILL weigh the maincrop spuds when we actually DO lift them to store them

I am also not going to include salad stuff or herbs either as that would just get plain silly too! I do not buy any salad stuff from April through till October at all and we eat salad only sporadically during the rest of the year and that is only what I can grow in the polytunnel....


This year we are not yet harvesting the Onions as they are still putting on growth but they are looking good for a fine crop to store and use through the winter. The French Beans are not yet ready and the Leeks and Parsnips, although they will be good, are obviously not yet ready either. The Broad beans were rubbish this year, as were the Shallots. Carrots we are eating now are the thinnings from the rows although I shall begin to dig up the big ones soon...and freeze some of them for winter use. I have also got some more Carrots and Turnips in for a quick crop to eat and store in the autumn! Brassicas don't do well here...the pigeons massacre the lot and if they don't, the squirrels do........so I have not bothered to grow any previously.........BUT I am trying a few in the polytunnel this year so we shall see....

Sweetcorn...well I grow some as a treat but only about 30 plants and quite often the squirrels get a lot of them.

We now get 5 or 6 eggs a day from the 6 hens, even though Thursday keeps laying soft shelled eggs ( which she then treads on, the silly girl.....)

So...a lot of food and if we eat a fairly restricted diet we could not buy much in the way of fruit or veg!

And as an excercise to help my feeble memory I am going to note down as much of the stuff I harvest as I can remember!

I didn't do this earlier in the month day by day but I HAVE weighed the stuff as it comes in the house so.....

what has been harvested from the start of cropping, earlier in the month, until 24/07/07... EXCLUDING what we have also eaten !

Tomatos 8 Kg,
12 Cucumbers 500g each,
Courgettes 8 Kg,
Carrots 3 Kg
5 Kg Blackcurrants (frozen, some made into Blackcurrant Vodka)
4 Kg Redcurrants (Compostman made into 8 jars Jelly)
2 Kg Gooseberries (frozen, awaiting me to get on and make Chutney)


Tayberries ahem they get eaten before anything can be made from them I am afraid!


NO Rivers Early plums..( damn those squirrels!) and Pears likewise...and it is going to be a rubbish year for plums generally by the look of it...a combination of weather and squirrel I suspect.

THEN everyday for a few days I shall try to remember to post what I harvest!

25/07/08 2 Cucumbers 500g each, Tomatoes 2 Kg , Courgette 4 Kg, 6 eggs
26/07/08 Cherry Toms 600g, 1 Aubergine 150 g! ( first one hurrah!) 6 eggs
27/07/08 Toms 500g, 1 Cucumber 750 g whopper!, Courgettes 1 Kg, 1 Aubergine 200g, 4 eggs
28/07/08 Toms 1 Kg, Courgettes 2 Kg , 2 Aubergines 250 g each, 5 eggs


The Aubergines are a long thin variety called ( surprise) Long Purple which are really good for Ratatouille. The Tomatos are a mixture of Beef, various eating and cherry varieties.

I shall try to remember to do this every time I post...as it will help me to keep track of what we DO get from the garden! And if you ever visit at this time of year be prepared to be fed on tomato and courgette omlette, potatos and salads!

(Actually thats what we seem to be eating a lot of!)

Killing animals

This year we have had horrendous problems with both Rats and Squirrels eating our food crops.

Remember...we grow stuff to live on, this is our food for the next year, so this is a fairly major issue for us to deal with.

The squirrels have eaten all the pears off of our 2 pear trees and stripped two of the eight apple trees in the orchard of ALL the apples.

Added to this, the squirrels have got into the polytunnel and started eating the crops in there as well...and as well as feeding us for the summer, I sell stuff made from them as well as preserving the surplus for use over the winter.

Last year we lost ALL our sweetcorn and most of the pumpkins to squirrel damage....and the rats are eating our eggs, upsetting the hens and destroying crops before they are harvestable in the PT.....

So...the rats and squirrels HAVE to go...after a few years of "live and let live"(when they DIDN'T eat our crops) they are now a major problem.

And we HAVE to do something...

So...we have now got a live trap for the squirrels, Eradibait bait boxes for the rats everywhere and an air gun to dispatch either anything caught in the traps or which we can shoot on the fly...

and since yesterday tea time Compostman has killed 8 squirrels...thats 8 in less that 24 hours...:-0

Today at tea time we caught another squirrel. We have talked about the trapping of these vermin before, and Compostmiss wanted to go and see the newly trapped squirrel and watch it being shot. Compostman was not sure about this as he was concerned about her being distressed to see what was involved...but she DID watch..and was fine. She was sad about the need to do it, but understood WHY we needed to do it...we have had lots of talks about stuff like this...and we were proud of her that she understands the distinctions involved here.

But oh I really wish the rats and squirrels would just bugger off! ...and then we WOULDN'T have to kill them like this......we have 3 acres of wildlife woodland which we actively manage for wildlife for Gods sake..why can they not just GO AWAY and live in it......

I hate doing all this I really do.....but it HAS to be done...

:-(

ARRRRHHHHGG Tree Rats!!

The view from our kitchen window most mornings at the moment is of a lot of birds and a LOT of squirrels. I try to adopt a "live and let live" attitude, but the squirrels are becoming more and more of a problem as each day goes by........

Their latest outrage is to eat all the bird food and destroy the feeders.

There were only 2 there today, but some days there have been 6 of them AND they are now massacring the leeks in the veg patch!









Part of me thinks their antics are entertaining BUT they are now getting TOO destructive for us to tolerate any more. Hmm I feel the purchase of a gun coming on.