Pop Goes The Weasel

Slowly my vegetables grow

I saw my first weasel the other day. In fact I saw two, scampering across the lane in single file before my car reached them and diving through the hedge. These miniature carnivores, the smallest in Britain, are not particularly rare but somehow I’ve lived nearly forty years without bumping into one, until now. It probably has something to do with spending much of my life in towns which are apparently not where weasels like to hang out. Rats, sure. Foxes too are increasingly moving to the city to make their living. But the humble weasel still prefers the quiet life out in the countryside.

These were not Welsh weasels as I was not far from Pilsdon in West Dorset when I spotted them, unless they like me had travelled from Wales for a short break in the south. For a whole week I am leaving my crops to grow untended. The hope is that they can manage well enough without me for a little while although it won’t take long before the slugs realise I’m not coming out every night with murderous intent, and send out invites to all their slug relations in neighbouring woodlands to the biggest feast of young beanlings, cabbages, lettuces and spinach that their sluggish minds can dream of. Let’s hope the party’s set for next week when I’m back. The vegetable plants sheltering inside the polytunnel - the tomatoes, cucumbers, courgettes and butternut squash - are being watered daily by a kind neighbour. I have left the polytunnel doors open so it doesn’t get too hot during the day, and constructed a makeshift wire gate across them to prevent pheasants from wandering in for breakfast, lunch and dinner. 

Tomatoes and butternut squash on the left, courgettes and spinach on the right

So now all I have to do is try to forget my concern for all my baby plants struggling to survive in the Welsh heartlands and focus instead on the wondrously luscious and bountiful place that is Pilsdon’s garden. Cared for as it is by a team of six or seven enthusiasts and primed with tonnes of rich cow manure over many years, the plants have had no trouble in exploding into maturity in a few short months. Broad bean plants in the big polytunnel that were just a foot or two high when I left at the beginning of March have since shot up, fruited, been harvested (twenty kilos of beans now in the freezer) and partly cleared. My job on Tuesday was to clear the rest of them from the bed and get it ready for about a million over-large tomato seedlings that are itching to get out of their cell trays and into some proper soil. In doing so I disturbed a mouse which had made its residence amongst the forest of broad bean plants; it scurried off to make mischief somewhere else. 

We suspect a mouse or possibly a larger rodent to be responsible for the devastation of one of the rhubarb plants that I had covered with a dustbin back in February to “force” it, i.e. to make it grow quicker and more tender in the darkness. It  should have been removed and the rhubarb eaten by now, but this had been overlooked with all the thousand other things going on in the garden. When we lifted the bin all we found was a sad looking limp stalk lying on the soil, and a hole.

The spinach bed, or the slug's party zone, depending on your perspective

In the spring we had discovered a rat living in Pilsdon’s one of compost bins whilst I was demonstrating to those taking over from me how to look after them. Even though we are careful not to put any cooked kitchen waste into the compost so as not to attract them, obviously the rat still thought it a worthwhile place to set up home. So far I haven’t found rats on my Welsh plot, although last week I was woken up one night by a scratching sound under the caravan somewhere, which stopped when I poked my nose out. Let’s hope it was just mice, of which I have seen one or two around there. Of the other mammals that are possible co-habitants of my land, I have seen only grey squirrels and the occasional mole. No rabbits, thankfully, although there are some in a field a mile away. No otters, although the ecologist who surveyed my land last year reckoned they would be around by the riverbank. No deer. Certainly no weasels. What I would really love to see is the pine marten, but the last concrete evidence of any of these rare animals living anywhere around here was some poo found near Aberystwyth in 2007.  I’ll keep my eyes peeled.