My Garden and Other Animals - Mike Dilger

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water feature should also provide a welcome home to pond skaters, water boatmen, pond snails, water beetles, water fleas, a whole array of different larvae and aquatic plants too. In fact the only group that most definitely would not be welcome in our pond-to-be would be fish. I’m afraid it’s a cold, hard fact that garden ponds with fish are much less diverse and interesting – unless of course you are only interested in fish – but I wanted a wildlife pond not an ornamental pond. While I’m the first to admit that koi carp or goldfish are a lovely addition to water features of posh stately homes, it must be remembered that these fish are also voracious introduced predators in what is effectively a closed system. In a zoo, for example, no one would ever do anything as stupid as to open all the cages to see what would happen, as the obvious answer would be a few fat lions. Likewise, non-native fish would quickly clear out the eggs and larvae of all the species that I was far more interested in. So, the nearest any fish would get to my pond would be the ones swimming past in the brook at the bottom of the garden!

      The other task that Christina and I would be tackling this month would be the building of a small raised vegetable bed. Although not as critical a feature of a wildlife garden as the pond, we knew that growing some produce would be desirable for a number of reasons. Firstly, there is something primeval and ‘deep-rooted’ in our souls about being able to support ourselves, even if only in a small way. Those who have tended and nurtured their own vegetables from seeds or seedlings to the final product will also vouch that they always taste better than anything bought in a supermarket. Finally, organically grown veg is undoubtedly more environmentally friendly than food that is mass-produced, as our planned patch, for example, would be pesticide-free and have a virtually nonexistent carbon footprint.

      Importantly, it was only fair that as the garden was, let’s not forget, equally owned by Christina, we should incorporate her wish to at least have some element of it as a smallholding. This wasn’t for one minute an attempt to emulate the hilarious attempts at self-sufficiency by Tom and Barbara Good as seen in The Good Life, but the sacrifice of a small part of the garden to grow at least some of our own produce somehow also dove-tailed with the ‘nature reserve’ ethos that we were trying to create. With this in mind, the previous week we had hired a van to collect three old railway sleepers purchased from a huge reclamation yard in Wells. Our raised vegetable bed would be built with a rustic yet chunky design.

      So in addition to buying a large piece of marine plywood to act as a simple lid for the compost bins, the shopping list at the DIY store also consisted of a bunch of canes and some spray paint to enable us to delineate exactly where the pond and the vegetable plot would go. Picking Christina up from work on the return journey, the longer spring evenings now meant that we would have at least a couple of hours in the garden to get some work done before bad light stopped play.

      As Christina had by now finally relented to my request that the pond would indeed be located in the more formal section of the garden, close to the communal fence with Andy and Lorraine, we set about sticking canes into the lawn to experiment with different shapes and designs. The advantage of using canes meant that when we ran some twine around the outside of these markers, like a cat’s cradle, it gave an immediate impression of how the finished pond would look. The pond’s location had been chosen both because it was a sunny spot, with the resultant warmth helping to encourage an even greater diversity of wildlife, and also crucially because it was far enough away from any mature trees whose leaves would constantly clog the pond each autumn and block out all-important light. The hope was that we would then surround the pond along the shared fence line and around the rear with a sumptuous herbaceous border, full of places for dragonflies to perch, butterflies to sunbathe and amphibians to hide – or this was the idea.

      While we wanted a pond of a reasonable size, we did have to bear in mind that the garden wasn’t exactly huge, and so something the size of a small swimming pool would, frankly, have looked ridiculous. Moving the sticks in or out eventually resulted in a shape and size that we were both happy with and which vaguely seemed to resemble a 10- by 12-foot kidney bean. We marked out our agreed outline with yellow spray paint, and then removed the sticks to admire our work. True, at present it looked more like the crime scene where Mr Blobby had been killed in cold blood, but with time and skill levels permitting it would be transformed into the garden’s star feature, to which the wildlife would come flocking!

      Situated no more than a couple of large strides from the scene of the crime and butting up to the cherry-tree bird table sculpted by tree surgeon Rob, the water butt and the corner of the garage, would be the location of the raised vegetable bed. The overall plan was to funnel garden visitors down in between the pond and the raised bed, where they would then be confronted by the screen of apple trees, and through which they would pass to reach the meadow, the wooded bank and finally the brook. Measuring a standard railway sleeper length of 8 feet 6 inches, we planned for two of the pre-purchased sleepers to represent the longer sides, while the third one, which had already been cut in half, would complete the rectangle at either end. A total surface area of 40 square feet would hardly provide enough room to keep us in vegetables all winter, but with so many other features competing for space, we would have to cut our cap according to our cloth.

      Sharp-eyed as ever, while I was busily marking out the raised bed with the canes, Christina had spotted a dunnock carrying what looked like moss back to one of the small ornamental leylandii cypresses which were within Andy and Lorraine’s garden, but whose foliage spilled over the fence into our garden – making it just as much our nest as theirs! If we also factored in that the dunnocks seemed to spend most of their time in our garden, hoovering up any scraps dropped from the birds messily eating from the feeders above their heads, then I felt quite justifiably that we could count this as our first proper nest – apart from the jackdaw nest that we didn’t talk about anymore!

      To say that the dunnock is an unspectacular-looking bird would be an understatement, as plumage-wise the bird is utterly forgettable, but underneath that plain exterior is a bird with quite possibly the most complex sex life of any known in the UK. Put simply, in the world of the dunnock anything goes; whilst some pairings do persist with the typical male to female ratio of one to one, some males will have two females, with other females opting for two or more males. However, other individuals’ relationships can be even more intriguing, and in some cases several males share several females. While the dunnock’s sexual relations could in essence be described as being more akin to either a 1970s hippy commune or a more thoroughly modern swingers’ party, it is always still the female who has the task of both building the nest and incubating the eggs, before either her one partner or the extended parental family chip in to help raise the brood.

      With some light left before dusk drew a veil over the day and prevented further work, there was still the opportunity to get a few of the herbaceous perennials we had been steadily accumulating into the new garage border that Christina had so diligently and single-handedly created. So alongside the rejuvenated wisteria and clematis, in quick succession we were able to plant out all of Mark’s recent donations plus a climbing rose and some bearded irises. Hopefully with the addition of a few more key plants, this bed would be a riot of colour in just a couple of months.

      With Christina off to spend the Saturday morning catching up with family, this gave me the perfect opportunity to prepare the ground for the raised bed. Christina’s brilliant idea at dinner the night before had been to get the sleepers in position before starting work on the pond. This meant the empty bed would be the perfect receptacle for absorbing most of the soil generated from digging the pond only a couple of yards away. It was so devastatingly simple, the only thing I wanted to know was why I hadn’t thought of it.

      I was acutely aware that I had slightly spoilt the final presentation of the compost bins by not having levelled the ground properly before positioning them, so this time I would be checking everything meticulously with a spirit level. Unlike the bins, tucked away out of sight behind the garage, the raised bed would be constantly on full show and therefore required a more exacting level of care and attention. Unfortunately the projected location of the raised bed would also be cutting across part of the concrete path which ran like a backbone down the centre of the garden, so before the sleepers were lifted into place this would have

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