Gardening

I have been doing battle with Ratty in my garden shed-one side of which is neatly stacked with a rapidly diminishing wall of dry firewood. A tower of blue milk crates houses my pressure sprayers, tarpaulins and lawn sprinkler attachments while along the remaining sides hang my hardworking and elderly array of hand implements.

 

My garden shed is mine and about which I am annoyingly pedantic. After all, my man has his own cave for assorted tools, cables, bulky Herculeanlike musical equipment and noisy machinery which is his holy domain and in which I tread not!

 

I have an old tiered vegetable rack on wheels which holds stocks of fertilizer, lime, potash, blood and bone, spray mixes, weed killer concentrate, plastic measures,acollection of old gloves and secateurs.Onhooks and nails in the upright beams hang trowels, forks and pronged weed extractors, while the horizontal niches harbour jars of lolly stick plant labellings, string and wire, hormone rooting gel and my treasured French Opinel knife.

 

Cosy in the far corner sitsauseful stack of buckets, bins, pots and stakes, beside which a tottering tower of empty graduated flowerpots lean at a rakish angle. Or did. Ratty has trashed the pots, nibbled around many of the edges, eaten much of the large bag of blood and bone, decimated a store of carefully dried sunflower heads, scarlet runner beans salvaged from last season's crop, the packets of broad and French beans due for planting this week and, worse still, shredded all the tarps presumably for nesting material. It's not enough for him to leave the tell-tale trail of evidence announcing how large and happy we are in Ratatouille land, he makes an appearance not once but thrice during the day and smiling wickedly from atop the woodpile.

 

While the trap lies untouched, the hunks of bait I placed vanished as if by magic . . . noiselessly and almost the moment the shed door closed. I anticipateaputrid stench from beneath the concrete base within the next few days- whereupon I shall dance a tango in my wellies in the rain to celebrate before restocking from the garden centre seed shelves.

 

Still, there is a wealth of product on the market for rodent control. One can get expert advice and applications from local pest control specialists like Flybusters who may set rodent bait stations or tunnels which protect non-target animals from access. Bait blocks , traps and powders are obtainable from hardware stores or supermarkets and for the more gentle-natured folk there are live capture traps or even electromagnetic, ultrasonic and ionic plug-in repellent machines. Bear in mind that rats are vectors of disease, like it or not. If in doubt, seek professional help.

 

But back to the garden.My compost bins are now enclosed, blood and bone locked down in aclip lidded bin, the tarps incinerated with the autumn leaves and all the while our over-fed, leaf-moth-and-insect hunting cats gaze