Content warning: at the end below the fold is a picture of a dead animal that some people might find disturbing.

 

Adding thermal mass to my greenhouse seems to be working well so far. There is not that much sun but yesterday the barrels did heat up at almost 23°C in the upper half and they effectively prevented it from overheating during the day and subsequently slightly heating it in the night. I already put in there the growing trays with onion seedlings and they are doing reasonably well so far.

I put a bunch of old aluminum bars across them to serve as a shelf. My father got a lot of them somehow, somewhere when I was a kid and they are very useful around the garden. Practically all my outdoor shelves are from these. I think they are discarded old laths from industrial weaving looms. Some of them have a lot of parallel grooves worn out on one side.

Like every year, I have to harvest and process the wood from my coppice. Although this year I don’t have that much of it since I harvested almost all of it last year and thus this year I only had a significant amount of thicker poles from the pool at the end of my sewage cleaning facility. I did, however, cut and prepare 200 poles for growing beans. I have big beans plans for this year.

The weather was very pretty and warm for a few days, with virtually no rain. That lack of rain is going to be a problem if it does not change soo, but at least I could till my “field” last Monday. I was expecting to be completely knackered after this but I felt surprisingly well and chipper the next day. I planned two days rest but I felt really well so that I continued to work on Tuesday.

Tuesday morning I was carting my parents around to various doctor appointments and shopping but in the afternoon I did have a few hours left. So I took my electric verticutter from the garden shed and I used it to get some of the most egregious moss growth out of the lawn. I intend to use this moss to grow potatoes from last year’s leftovers. It won’t work as well as planting proper seeding potatoes in the ground but it should work well enough to be worth it. I was tired after this, but still not too much. I wanted to have a rest the next day but I got delivered three new fruit trees – one pear and two apples – that needed planting asap. The delivery of the trees was actually slightly delayed, otherwise I would not bother with the moss.

To protect the tree roots from vole damage for at least a few years I dug a hole with approximately 1 m diameter and 30 cm deep. I put a wire mesh in it to protect the sides On the bottom I put stones that I sorted out during the digging and also some thorny brambles from wild brambleberry. I managed to plant one tree on Wednesday and after that I was tired and my back started to hurt. I thought that I would definitely need a rest after I planted the trees. Wrong!

I did not just need a rest, I could barely get out of bed. I had terrible pain in my lower back. I am susceptible to this if my back gets cold so I have to wrap up for work outdoors. But the treacherously sunny weather made me incautious and I did not dress properly for the moss removal and that came to bite me in the ass with vengeance. On Wednesday I felt slight pain and I dressed warmly, but it was too late. Muscles around my sacrum got inflamed and whenever I tried to bend or walk it was like having knives stuck in my pelvis. The worst was when I had to sneeze or cough.

This is where I had a stroke of luck. My nephew came for a visit on Friday. He planted the remaining two trees, helped with heating, and did some shopping while I was barely able to lie down and moan.

Normally when this happens, a few days of dry heat and rest is enough but this time I had to take medication. I started with Paracetamol and when that did not help, I switched to Ibuprofen. I do not like taking analgesics but sometimes there is no other way since I could not even sit at the computer, I had to lie down most of the day. This Wednesday I was finally capable of a short walk, albeit with a cane.

Being able to walk means being able to prepare some soil and plant some seeds. So I filled eight yogurt cups with soil and sown oregano and basil. I have never grown these spices/herbs although I use them in almost every recipe. I am curious as to how they will grow. Does anyone here have experience with how many plants I should plant for a reasonable harvest (1 jam jar of dried shredded stalks)?

The bell peppers thrive under the grow lights reasonably well. I had eight big plants, four of which I gave to my nephew and four of which I repotted today into bigger containers because they were already outgrowing the yogurt ones. I also have a fifth pepper plant, you can see it between the basil and oregano. That one is stunted because the cotyledons did not free properly from the seed shell and thus it did not have proper nutrition at the start. But it seems to be growing and it might catch up with the rest so I did not throw it away yet. Overall I planted 10 seeds and an 80% germination rate is reasonable.

And now a bit gruesome theme, that fits the title of this article too. 

This is something that I absolutely hate doing but there is no other way. We used to have cats but those did not help much. They love to catch mice like these, but they do not catch them systematically around the house – they wander around in the fields and meadows for hundreds of meters and there is no guarantee they will keep the garden pest-free, although they help.  Kestrels and owls help a bit too but we lost a lot of trees to infrastructure building in the last few years, which means fewer perches for raptors.

And this year, after a long time of not doing anything about the rodents, I had to do something. Not only did mice make nests in my wood shed adjacent to the workshop and leave droppings everywhere but even worse, voles and mice got into the electrical works for my water cleaning facility and started to nibble on the cables. I could not rodent-proof it in the winter so I had to put traps in various places and check them regularly. I baited the traps with walnuts in the hope that it will attract more rodents and fewer shrews but unfortunately, it did not work like that. It turns out that shrews like to eat walnuts too. I caught over a dozen rodents and almost as many shrews.

I was able to eradicate the mice nesting in the shed but I cannot do so for those around the cleaning facility. Those are connected via tunnels to an underground network that most likely extends hundreds of meters into the surrounding area. So a few days can come by when nothing gets caught and then suddenly a few days in a row I catch several animals. I caught both voles and mice in there, although I did not bother to identify the exact species. I do not think I caught any water voles, this trap would be too small for them anyway, but I do think I caught some short-tailed field voles. I tried to put a bigger trap in there, but I still had no luck catching water voles.

I’d prefer to live in a world where I could make a pact with these – “you can eat all the grass and you can eat those trees but leave these plants and these trees – and especially the cables – alone and we’ll go along just fine”. In the world we live in, I must either put up traps or hit them with a shovel, or be resigned to them destroying a lot of my work.