Sparrow attack...

Weather: Raining - should brighten up later 20C

This week's harvest: basil, courgette (one, the first small Verde di Milano!), rocket (lots) Lettuce (one Tom Thumb - between crops) thyme, artichoke (two - with lots more to come) .


And so to a small apology to the slug population of my garden (much reduced because of the success of the nematode treatments). I have been struggling to bring on spinach - and to some extent lettuce - seedlings and of course blamed the chewed leaves on the slugs....until I caught the culprits in the act. (See rather blurry photo shot through the runner beans..) There, balancing on the seed heads of the regrowth of last year's spinach, is one of my little flock of house sparrows enjoying a little greenery in addition to the seeds I put out in their feeder. There's gratitude for you! A few days before, I had watched a big fat male sparrow casually decimating a seedling...in fact technically more than 'decimating' it because he had ripped off a lot more than ten per cent of the plant.

Now this is a little difficult to take in. I love my little flock of sparrows and despite still coming out top of the RSPB's Big Garden Birdwatch survey as the most common bird in our gardens, their numbers have fallen drastically over the last thirty years and are on their Red conservation list.

I certainly don't want to put them off living in my garden in fact they have featured in Nature's Voice the podcast I make for the RSPB. We devoted much of the episode we made for this year's Big Garden Birdwatch to sparrows which can be downloaded from the link as an mp3, should you like to hear it.

My solution to my current problem is to suspend a criss-cross of cotton above my seedlings. I haven't caught them touching them since but we will have to wait and see. I know that some people use horticultural fleece to protect their plants but my veg garden is one of my favourite places to sit and the aesthetics are as important to me as the produce and ...well horticultural fleece just doesn't do it for me.