Killed out rescuing bloody rabbits

Lucky baby rabbit no 3; rescued this evening...soooo cute

One of the more unfortunate side effects of having cats is the indiscriminate murder of fluffy cute animals that we would consider TOO CUTE to die (especially too cute to find pieces of after the event, like a gall bladder or fluffy tail end!). While Ginger might consider himself too old, at the grand old age of 5, to go around chasing rabbits, he is not above helping to corral them into tight spaces for the other two cats to catch. Maybe he gets his bit of fresh rabbit for his trouble, I don't know. Meanwhile Dutch and Sooty are just getting to their prime at 9 months of age. Young, fit and carrying no excess weight they couldn't been keener hunters and it's prime hunting season with nearby fields literally awash with baby rabbits. So rabbit is on the menu, every bloody day!

Bunny no 2 had a little injury but ran off home no bother

In the last three days Seamus has managed to rescue no fewer than three baby rabbits and return all of them to the field from which they came. You can be sure for the three that were rescued many, many more have died, but it's hard to watch it happen in front of you and hard in particular to listen to the horrible squealing of the little rabbit in the cats mouth.So if we can we distract or put the cats in and capture the rabbits ourselves. Once across the road and in the field they recover from the ordeal that left them trembling and still in our hands and spring back to life; maybe the very smell of the field gives them the urge to run home. Really their mothers take shocking care of them, they should never get into the clutches of our well fed cats in the first place.

Back at home tonight all three cats are thrown down and exhausted. Dutch in particular who was missing for most of the day has obviously overindulged, he is flat out on one side of me with Ginger crashed out on the other. Every now and again his paws twitch as he dreams of chasing more rabbits! Sooty meanwhile has a whole couch to himself to nap on. There isn't a gug out of any of them.It's like Easter Sunday after the last Easter egg has been demolished!!

Rabbit no1 biggest of the three rescues

There is a funny side to all of this. This evening I met my neighbour at my gate and we stood up chatting in the sun for a few minutes.Sooty was waiting inside the gate for me and Geraldine spotted him. "O" she said "he is a great cat, I see himself and the grey one (Dutch) in my garden all the time, do you know I have completely cut back on rat poison since they arrived?"
"No" I said, in the calmest tone I could muster all the while feeling quite faint at the thought of rat poison and my precious cats.
" O yes" she said "its brilliant, if they could manage to kill the rabbits now that would be great, the bloody place is over-run with the bastards!!"

Sooty and rabbit no3

And on that note I will say goodnight to you all and leave you with the last photo of the day Sooty with poor rabbit no 3 before the rescue in his mouth.

For those of you that may be wondering, no I didn't tell my neighbour we are rescuing the rabbits!

Earthing up spuds in the glasshouse

let there be spuds

Just a quick post to let you know that I have earthed up my spuds in pots. I'm experimenting with "Rocket" and "Swift" that are renowned for giving a fast crop (in two months!) under cover. Mine were sown in February (in pots of cow manure and put in the glasshouse under fleece) and despite my standing over them they showed no sign of life up to two weeks ago when shoots suddenly appeared. These have amazed me since at their speed of growth, I know they are called Rocket and Swift but I'm still amazed!! Will I be eating them by the end of April though? Watch this space....God I'm getting hungry now just thinking about it..

Overwintered sweet peas V spring sown ones

Ah sweet peas and roses...summer bottled

For a long time I have been reading how Autumn sown overwintered sweet peas in a cold frame are THE WAY to grow sweet peas, bringing you stronger multi-branched plants that bloom earlier and produce huge crops of flowers......The only problem is that by October I'm not inclined to sow anything. I am long retired from sowing as far as I'm concerned. I finish sowing around June and concentrate all my efforts on EATING from there on out. It's the whole point surely of growing all that veg in the first place?! And as much as I love sweet peas I could never summon up the motivation to want to look after them through the winter. So for years it never happened. Until finally last year I read Monty Don giving advise on sweet peas and happened to see the man in the UK with the national sweet pea collection on the A to Z of TV gardening and there were both espousing the merits of an Autumn sown plant. I gave up the fight, dragged myself out one fine day in October and grumbling to myself begrudgingly set one root trainers worth of seeds.

February transplanting; un-eaten on the right, eaten on the left

After that not much happened. I was disappointed to see that germination was quite erratic and more disappointed when I missed a slug getting in who managed to graze several seedlings to the ground.That's the problem with winter weather. A lot can happen outside while you are inside wrapped up on the couch watching The Tunnel, eating for Ireland and piling the fire high. The survivors apparently shocked into hibernation by the death of their brothers looked a bit forlorn and miserable while I stared into the cold frame pulling my eyebrows together and fretted about them. By Christmas I gave up fretting, forgot all about sweet peas and concentrated on seed catalogues and new types of tomatoes. They were still alive but not looking like they would amount to much.I was ready to write them off as a failed experiment and send a tweet to Monty to ask him what I was missing.

Sweet peas looking good this April

Around February much to my surprise I realised they were starting to grow, with roots beginning to poke out the bottom of the root trainers. I re-potted them all and once I opened the root trainers I was surprised again to find that almost all of them had in fact germinated and those I thought had failed or had been grazed by slugs were sending up second growth, so I ended up transplanting far more than I had expected to. Over the last two months they have steadily grown taller and bushed out, while in the last few weeks they have been fully hardened off outside. It was really only last week when I put the spring sown sweet pea seedlings beside them that I could see the value of the overwintering plants. They are three times the size, climbing well and looking extremely promising.

Spring sown sweet peas

The final test will be the flower crop outdoors this summer of course. Tomorrow we have a willow weaving workshop planned in Kilmallock for the FETAC 5's where we will all make and bring home willow garden obelisks for climbing plants like our sweet peas. Now all that's left to do is to prepare the ground with horse manure, compost and chicken pellets!

The secret life of slugs

Slug Cartography; A slug maps out Spain and Portugal in the veg garden..is he looking to fly Ryanair?

I was going to title this "the sex life of slugs" but as ever, the thought of my mother somehow one day learning to use the Internet and actually reading my blog(longest odds in the world by a country mile) managed to discourage me. Last week I held the funniest class I have ever had as I tried to explain to my Science laden FETAC 5's, (without getting embarrassed myself which is harder than you might think!), how slugs mate. As you might imagine as we got into it (forgive the pun)chronic giggling broke out, followed by accidental (and not so accidental) innuendo, uproar followed, (it really went to shit at this point, even I was having trouble keeping a straight face)and cold showers were threatened until finally I got some type of order on the chaos, finished the lesson and survived the day. O Lord. I have a new found respect for teachers explaining the "facts of life" as we once quaintly called them to 11 year old's.These were adults! And worst of all it was all about the un-sexiest creature on the planet-the slug! Thank God I'm not explaining human reproduction to them.

For those of you who may not know it every slug (and snail)carry the bits for both male and female inside them, making them hermaphrodites. When they meet they push out their bits and swap sperm leading to both parties laying their own clutch of eggs after parting ways.This might begin to explain to you why slugs seem to be everywhere, as literally hundreds of eggs are produced by each slug each year. I'm not going near explaining Apophallation, thank God I didn't get into it in class , I'd have to be stretchered out! Needless to say if you are curious click on this link here to take you to the Wikipedia page that explains it all (its under the Reproduction heading). If you are male you might be better off not reading it at all-you have been warned!

Gosh that was really easy; there is a lot to be said for delivering this kind of information over the Internet from the comfort of the couch, no danger of blushing or getting embarrassed and no smart ass innuendo either!

Great Craic with Helen Dillon

Helen Dillon

My jaws are yet aching today after a great night with a unique stand up comedian.Hats off to The Limerick Garden Plants group who had Helen Dillon down from the big smoke to talk to the Gardeners of Limerick last night at the South Court Hotel. Helen is really funny -a bit of a deadly wit actually! She does a great line in telling it like it is so while many of her slides showed beautiful photos of her garden in proficient bloom there was also a gallery of failures. She explained the Irish expression of "it died on me" really translates into "I killed it" and honestly described how she has evolved from posh muted colour coordinated borders to "box of smarties" with loads of different colours in the borders.

She is fiercely direct and honest and feisty as hell! She has great tales of Christopher Lloyd and other famous gardeners she hob-nobbed with and is brilliantly self-depreciating in her re-telling of how people would come up to her after her Irish television career had finished to check it was really her because, as she puts it "everyone thought I was dead"!

A great Lady of Irish Gardening (even if we had to originally steal her from Scotland).Even I , a person prone to growing plants with a view to eating them can appreciate, and be inspired by such a passionate and energetic ornamental gardener (though to her credit she grows some veg in carefully tucked away raised beds hidden behind a sunny border in her garden). If you want the Dillon experience read any of her books, she also writes for Which Magazine and writes in the monthly Catholic "Messenger" (which got her a lot of new fans in the nuns!) and you can visit her beautiful garden in Dublin. Highly, highly recommended!

The Dillon Garden in Dublin

Slow, slower, slowest......

Sorry everyone, since the storm last month the internet service has been reliably awful. I can't post anything successfully, but, finally! the man over the phone opened a small window for me today with a temporary fix (that is coming and going all morning )and better yet a man with a tool box is coming out next Thursday, so hopefully I will be back blogging with a vengeance on Friday! In the meantime keep sowing and growing, and mind yer ankles!

Sowing onions from seed

There can never be enough onions , I wish I had a field!

The sun is shining (between pelting showers) but regardless of the weather today is the day for sowing onions from seed.I finally got my module trays(7cellx12cell) from Garden World at 9am sharp this morning.This year I am trying out module trays on the advise of Klaus Laitenberger who swears by sowing three onion seeds per module and transplanting all three to the next stage before separating them out in the outside bed.Usually I use an open tray and broadcast the seeds, but these Letrim Germans might be on to something, and I'll never know unless I try.

I'm experimenting with compost this year too. I'm trying out a new worm castings compost called Celtic Gold which I got in Raheen Co-op last week.Supposedly the addition of 10% worm castings boosts plant growth by 100%, on the downside the remaining 90% is peat based. Great stuff peat, but not sustainable unfortunately. And while I'm not exactly wearing hemp clothes and living off grid  you can't escape the pressures on our resources.

Seamus has resurrected the heavy duty propagator and it's all set up in the Utility, with only a few cat paw prints so far-Ginger has yet to break in properly to sleep on it as he did last year, knocking pots, flattening seedlings, (well hes a bit large and clumsy)and causing general chaos. This year the plan is to put a cloche over it to make it harder for him to find a way in. But you know cats, they would sit on your head to get a bit of heat, so I'll be dubiously optimistic until I see otherwise. Expect me to post photos of him caught rotten, trying to pretend he is invisible!