From the garden

Compared to the past few years, we have eaten little from the garden. What with rabbits eating many of the seedlings (no peas, snow peas, arugula, silverbeet, beans or broad beans), work travel at planting time in spring and me leaving the greenhouse shut one hot day, killing everything in it except the oregano and sage... it hasn't been the most successful gardening year. Still, there have been some delicious things to eat. I've dug up half a bed of beautiful baby pink eye potatoes, some lovely carrots, a few cherries and the two little blueberry bushes are so laden with fruit I've had to prop up the branches with stakes. I put half a kilo in the freezer yesterday! One the way are apples, pears and (hopefully) some tomatoes. I killed the two tomato plants in the greenhouse that were already fruiting, and the four plants outside are only just starting to fruit. Green plums can also be seen on one of the two trees planted a few years back. Fingers crossed!

Bloody rabbits

I know, I know, it's Easter, but I'm not feeling very charitable towards those cute little bunnies at the moment. Everyone around here has been complaining about the growing plague of them over the past year or two. They are super cheeky. There are piles of droppings on the lawn right close to our house. You can see below their attempt at ringbarking one of my young plum trees, and below that my latest attempt to foil them - that's the trunk of an apricot tree painted with bitumen rubber to deter chewing beasties. I've painted all the exposed trunks of the fruit trees and the olive. In the bottom photo, you'll see the fine tunnel a rabbit has dug in one of my freshly dug over raised garden beds. I won't be planting carrots in it.

Old school mouse traps work best

A couple of days ago some mouse droppings appeared under the fridge. Time to set the traps. First night out and success! One little mouse quickly dead.

We've battled mice in the chook shed before and found the traditional, low tech sprung trap on a wooden base work better than any of the fancy new contraptions. Not so for rats. They are way too smart to be caught in the larger version of the same trap. Unfortunately, we had to resort to using poison on the large and healthy family of rats that moved into the chook shed last spring.