New Hare Just Dropped

Yesterday I was speaking at an event at Broughton House. My photos don’t really do it justice but it has a garden that is, for me, pretty much the platonic ideal – not huge, but a glorious haven with wonderful borders, a productive but decorative veg plot, benches thoughtfully placed in a variety of sheltered spots and an optimistically large number of sundials when you consider the climate we have around here. It even had a resident cat who graciously allowed herself to be stroked and then plodded around in front of us as if giving us the tour.

My own garden is … somewhat less manicured, although it is about a thousand percent more manicured than it was at the start of the month. In fact, my clearing efforts have overwhelmed the capacity of the compost daleks so I have had to resort to just piling up the resulting weeds, to the point where there’s already a dalek’s worth waiting to go in.

Part of the point of my latest frantic binge gardening efforts have been to get it into a state where two octogenarians can safely reach the greenhouse to water it, for we are going away next week to the US for almost three weeks, leaving the Pepperpots in charge of the tomatoes (and keeping up with the salad). As our garden is already one big trip hazard (whoever laid it out was very fond of shallow steps with treads made out of old wooden sleepers, aka the slipperiest substance known to man), I was keen not to add to the dangers. It’s not quite National Trust standard, but you can at least now see where the paths are supposed to be and watch your footing.

Anyway, as the title of this blog post suggests, our garden does still fulfil its primary function of being wee hare habitat; something that would be less likely if it was at the more manicured end of the spectrum (or, indeed, had a resident cat). The latest leveret is a lot less chilled than its predecessor – it hasn’t come close enough to be usefully photographed, for example. But it has got wonderfully striking extra-dark tips to its ears which swivel constantly as it nibbles the clover on the drive before bolting the minute we step outside. It’s also got a worrying habit of hiding under the car when it rains, something to bear in mind when we need to drive anywhere.

Every year I try and work out how to combine an intermittently busy life with a steady application of gardening effort, and every year I revert to a cycle of binge and neglect. I’ll never have a garden quite like the one at Broughton House, but one day I hope to have one that approaches its level of charm, while still providing a steady supply of young hares to enchant us. That’s surely not too much to ask, is it?

Flee, All is Discovered

As I mentioned on Twitter, there’s a downside to wildlife friendly gardening – the wildlife does tend to do its own thing being, you know, wild …

In one downside to all our wildlife friendly gardening efforts, every single one of my freshly planted sweet peas has been nibbled down to ground level 😭

— Sally Hinchcliffe (@sallyhinch) May 25, 2022

These were the sweet peas that I had been nurturing since March, even suspending them out of harm’s way of the mice (and then subsequently having to rescue them after the inevitable happened and the string broke on one set of modules).

I’ve been way too busy to get much done in the garden in recent weeks (or maybe months), largely using the fact that we still have to finish erecting our rabbit defences around the vegetable patch as an excuse not to plant out too much stuff. But in the few half hours I had here and there in the last couple of weeks, I did manage to build some nice wigwams for my sweet peas and plant out some of the plants that had amazingly survived plummeting to the greenhouse floor and spending 24 hours upside down before I actually went up to check. It’s possible they may still survive being nibbled to the ground by either the rabbit or the hare, so I’ve put bottle cloches over them for now, to see if they might resprout.

I’m not that hopeful, however, and having built the damn wigwams I feel I’ve too much invested now in growing sweet peas to leave it chance. Fortunately it was the village plant sale today and I persuaded my parents this would be a nice outing for them and that we should probably get there early to have the best choice of plants, by which I obviously meant sweet peas.

Despite turning up pretty much at the stated starting time (a basic rookie error: all the gardeners get there early to drop off their own plants and then snap up the best of what’s there) I was informed that the only sweet peas had already gone. And then, lurking at the back I spotted these.

I reckon there’s about a 50:50 chance that these are sweet peas and not garden peas, as the plant stall holder was a little vague on the specifics. Either way, I’ve built those wigwams and they’re going in, and if they turn out to be garden peas, well that’s not the worst gardening mistake I’ve ever made.

Meanwhile, we’ve seen neither hide nor hare, as it were, of the likely culprit since the loss was discovered.*

A guilty conscience? I’ll let you decide.

* Actually, if it was the hare, it’s already forgiven, as it’s a long established principle that the hares in this garden can eat whatever they like. Indeed, if the other half could find a hare-recognition system that would let hares into the veg patch and keep rabbits out once our fence is completed he’d be onto it right away.

Lockdown …

At the risk of this becoming an ‘all hare content, all the time’ blog, we were just heading out for a walk this evening and on checking the back door was locked, discovered that our resident wee hare was behaving adorably, so obviously we had to stop and watch that.

Just as we were about to head out the front, it scampered round and settled down for the evening by the plant pot just beside the door.

Walks are over-rated, I guess. I expect we’ll manage to leave the house eventually.

Rabbit-Proof Fence

It may seem a little discriminatory of me to celebrate – indeed even write a book about – one species of Leporid that inhabits our garden, but react in horror at the sight of a different kind hopping about among the vegetation …

For yes, after 6 years of blissfully rabbit-free gardening, it seems that Peter and his siblings have finally arrived at our back door, and I may need to go the full Mr McGregor. Undoubtedly cute as this particular creature is, this is bad news, although not exactly surprising. When we first moved up here, I was expecting the place to be as overrun by bunnies as the old place was and was pleased to discover I could plant my veg patch more or less unmolested (hares, unlike rabbits, seem to like a varied diet and while they will nibble a few things here and there, they won’t systematically work their way through a bed of plants the way rabbits will). Talking to the Oldest Inhabitant, it turns out that there were rabbits, back in the day, but they were all but wiped out by some outbreak of virus or another and it’s taken until now for the little blighters to work their way back up our hill. Last year, our neighbours lost a lot of their veg to rabbits but we were okay (possibly because I was so disorganised last year they didn’t recognise our garden as having any actual veg in it). This year it looks like our luck has run out.

So it is time to resurrect our plans to fence in the veg plot. Unfortunately, while I laid it out with a fence in mind, time, the bendiness of my raised bed edges, and my own slightly cavalier approach to creating things means we now have to work out how to marry something inherently straight, like a fence, to something that’s a bit more … organic. I suspect the end result will not be particularly Chelsea and rather more at the ‘allotment chic’ end of the spectrum.

That said, a belated birthday present of a garden ornament should help raise the tone. At least this one won’t be eating anything …

I Spy…

Among the lovely birthday presents I got last weekend was a fun new toy: a night-vision trail cam that we hope will reveal to us any nocturnal shenanigans among the local wildlife. As well as the hares we’ve seen signs of possible badger activity and footprints in the snow earlier this year suggest we also get nocturnal visits from foxes, which we never see during the day. We’ve left it out overnight for a few nights now, and so far it’s fair to say that we’re still perfecting its placement and set up so that we can capture something slightly more exciting than us putting it up and taking it down …

However, reviewing the footage one morning, I did realise (after 3 or 4 viewings) that we’d captured something here other than the sound of the Extremely Loud Blackbird who’s been delivering our five am wakeup call with enthusiasm. Have a look and see if you see what I see (keep your eyes on the bottom left corner …)

OK, so it’s not going to turn the world of wildlife filming upside down, but it gives me hope that with a bit of fine tuning we might be able to get some decent footage.

In other news, the lambs have reached the ‘lamb gang’ stage where they spend most of their time hanging out in the corners of fields getting up to mischief and generally looking as if they’d be smoking behind the bike sheds, if only they had opposable thumbs. And cigarettes. And, indeed, bike sheds.

And, from the evidence of this photo, doing a little youthful experimentation into the joys of adult life too.

Outrun

Riding back from Park Run this morning, feeling pretty pleased with myself at getting a personal best (out of only two outings, but hey), my mood was ruined by the sight of a dead hare, right at the corner opposite our gate.

Seriously, who would get enough speed on this road to run over anything, let alone a hare?

Roadkilled hare isn’t that unusual around here – although generally they have the advantage over, say, rabbits and pheasants through their uncanny ability to run away from a car rather than towards it. But our road is tiny; it’s a dead end that serves six houses and a couple of farms, and you’d be hard pressed to drive faster than the average hare can run even if it’s not trying very hard – mostly they just lope along with no apparent effort at a good 20mph, so very much not like me at Park Run. I can only assume that someone was doing a three-point turn and the hare decided to sit tight on the verge, or else that some piece of farm machinery caught it somehow – the average tractor is a pretty tight fit on most of our roads these days.

Over the three years we’ve been here we’ve seen so many wee hares grow up into bigger hares, and then get replaced by a new wee hare. Some of them have had a distinctive appearance, they appear to have different personalities (being more or less chilled about people in the garden) and they all seem to have different taste in garden plants, and choose different hiding places to hang out (indeed, the latest one has been rather too fond of hiding under our car, so I hope that hasn’t lulled it into a false sense of security when it comes to motor vehicles). Our neighbours report the same – in fact, it was only yesterday that I was chatting to a neighbour about it and we were congratulating ourselves on what a hare-friendly neighbourhood we live in. They come, they stay a while, and then they go, and I’ve always fondly imagined them fanning out across the countryside until they’ve got wee hares of their own and then bringing them back to a place where they remember being safe. It’s gutting to discover one dead, just yards from the safety of our garden, especially in a week when we learned that wildlife numbers are continuing to plummet in the UK. But all we can do is continue to operate our garden primarily as a hare sanctuary and hope that this proves a one-off.

Postscript – just as I was writing this, I was delighted to see not one but two hares come through the garden and pause at the gate before heading off up the road. Here’s hoping they’re off to make more hares …

Blooming Marvellous

Returning from Edinburgh yesterday afternoon, and doing the garden round to see what if anything had changed in the two days I’d been away, I noticed that something had been nipping the flowers off my geum and leaving them scattered on the ground.

This morning, the culprit was revealed.

It appears that the stems of geums are very delicious if you’re a young hare.

Fortunately we’ve long since decided that when it comes down to flowers versus hares, the hares win every time. This one in particular takes cuteness to an advanced level, as I think you’ll agree …

(Photos courtesy of the other half and his much more capable camera)

This went some way towards cheering me up after our MSPs made entirely the wrong decision in Parliament yesterday.

Habitat Management

I don’t know why I ever think this, but as I nipped out into the garden this afternoon to take advantage of a brief respite between downpours, I thought there wouldn’t be too much to do. Naturally, a couple of hours later, once the rain closed in again, all I had done was remind myself what a mammoth amount of work it’s going to take to get to grips with it all.

Normally I choose my camera angles carefully to highlight the good bits of the garden. This is more the reality

Today’s task was to clear up the dead vegetation that has been lying around being wildlife habitat over the winter. Unfortunately, I quickly discovered that one clump of bracken was still being wildlife habitat in the form of a young hare whose parents hadn’t read the information that says their breeding season has only just begun.

I think I’d have things somewhat more under control if I didn’t have to garden around whichever bit of the garden was currently favoured as a hare resting place, but then our garden wouldn’t have hares in it, and that would be wrong. Much as I’d like a beautiful and productive garden crammed full of interesting plants, its key role in our lives is to look like the sort of a garden a responsible hare parent can leave her offspring in. So I can’t simply lay waste to all the undergrowth and patches of brambles and nettles – I’ve got to wait until I’ve got something to replace each bit with that’s a bit more garden like but also functions as suitable hare habitat.

(This doesn’t explain the pallets, obviously, but we have plans for them and they will be put to use in the fullness of time)

So I keep chipping away at the edges, clearing out bits as I have plants for them, and averting my eyes from the rest. Some of these plants even, miraculously, survive, if they are not too delicious to the hares.

I think this is the first lupin ever to last longer than a month in my care, let alone over winter…

Meanwhile, we have exciting composting news (and also another exciting delivery* lurking in the garage which I can’t blog about for non-fate-tempting reasons) but that will have to wait for another

*Not a bike, before you get too excited

Lurking

Heading to the garden yesterday afternoon to pick some beetroot, I encountered a problem:

Can’t see it? Let me help:

I did wonder whether I could sneak in and grab a couple of beetroot without disturbing it but it took fright (I say took fright: it didn’t so much run off as saunter so it’s possible they’re aware they would have us wrapped around their little fingers, if hares had little fingers). Fortunately the hares seem fonder of sitting on beetroot than eating it, so there was plenty for the beetroot salad* I had planned for my writers’ group pot luck dinner.

Other things lurking among the veg are, frankly, a bit less welcome:

I may have to learn to love courgettes. Recipes welcome, preferably ones that don’t end ‘and you can barely taste the courgette’ as that doesn’t really fill me with a sense that it’s worth growing.

Anyway, the salad seemed to go down well and after an evening of good food and great chat, I realised with a bit of shock that it was 10 o’clock and I had better get on my bike and ride home. I do love these long light and warm summer evenings. The heatwave may have left this corner of Scotland (it rained for most of today) but we’re still getting enough warm weather to make riding at night a positive pleasure – especially when there are no cars, and the only other thing moving as I made my way home were the bats dancing above my head.

*Beetroot, feta cheese and parsley – known as ‘Barbie salad’ because of the colour the feta cheese goes

Eating a Rainbow

Never mind all that gadding about in the sunshine in France, I hear you cry: what of the garden? How is your veg plot growing?

Well, funny you should ask that – thanks to the fine weather and a helpful neighbour it’s all looking rather good, at least for now, although the hares have done their best to remove any danger we might have a glut of french beans by nibbling the seedlings as they emerge from the ground. They don’t seem to have quite the same taste for kale and rainbow chard though…

Unfortunately, as we were on our way back from France we had news of a family bereavement which means that rather than spending the next few weeks as we’d planned, going absolutely nowhere, the other half has already had to hot foot it back to the US and I will be following him for the weekend.

This has left me home alone with no company but the hares, and the feeling that I ought to be at least trying to keep up with the garden’s production before it all starts to get out of hand. As someone who is not one of nature’s vegetable eaters, this is proving a bit of an effort. On the other hand, after a trip during which I struggled to eat even one serving of veg and one of fruit a day, let alone five of them, it will probably be good for me. Even if I’m still yet to find a completely convincing recipe for rainbow chard.

Perhaps I should invite the hares around for dinner?