'Think global, act local'...

The full moon a giant peach. Low hanging, above Dorket Head as I drive home with mum at dusk. Dad has now been diagnosed with ‘advanced dementia’ and is in Lings Bar hospital being assessed. He won’t be coming home. None of us is finding it easy. We take mum to visit each day. Too little time for the healing hand of nature...

Pecky blue tit

Yellow winter aconite balls are forcing through the leaves by the drive in the Woodland Garden. Snowdrops nose through leafmould. Fingers of daffodil leaves reach out in the grass beneath the lime trees. By night, tawny owls call, near the site of last years successful nest in a converted drawer, fixed high in a tree. This week the rare treat of the owls going beyond their ‘tu-whit and hoo-hoo’ call-and -response. Their daytime vocalisations  unexpected, unrecognisable and eccentric. Tawnies breed within a half mile of where they were born (their natal site) and as a consequence the young compete with their parents to establish breeding territories. We ringed the three young last year. A mild winter with plentiful small mammals may mean good survival chances for these. In 2018 bad spring weather reduced the small mammal population and the owls failed to breed.

We set up the ringing nets in the garden on Monday and caught 106 birds. Several were birds we’d ringed in nest boxes in the garden or on the farm. Lots of pecky blue tits. 

The garden bird feeders are assailed by waves of goldfinches and greenfinches until a ram-raiding great spotted woodpecker arrives. Occasionally too, a sparrowhawk. Over a kilo of sunflower hearts required to top the feeder each day. Pheasants scurry beneath, clearing the profligacy that falls from above.

Untamed perennial beds

Mulching our no-dig vegetable garden beds with compost is almost complete. Carrots remain. Leeks too. And some cannonball-sized beetroot that the voles and mice nibble into. Broccoli is standing proud and yellowing lower leaves removed to spoil slug fun. Garlic, shallots and onions are showing. Stocky little broad bean plants have waited their turn in the greenhouse and were planted out under fleece today.

Jill has taken on the arduous task of clearing behind the tool shed. Then into the orchard ‘meadow’.

Managing the differing needs of wildflowers (cowslip, knapweed, oxeye daisy, hawkbits, camassia) and invertebrates and small mammals is the challenge. We don’t want the thickened grass to thwart the diversity of flowers we’re encouraging but don’t want to deny cover for newts, toads, voles or the overwintering larvae of insects....

I slog away in the Cedar walk where bramble trip wires lie in wait around our little Nordman spruce 'plantation'.

Perennial beds untamed provide refuge over winter for birds, small mammals, amphibians and inverts.

But for all of our endeavour, the question returns - are we wasting our time?

The issues feel too intractable, beyond anything we've been able to influence...
 Australia on fire under the leadership of climate change deniers; whales hunted again; here in the UK illegal fox hunting is flagrantly perpetrated; peat moors are desecrated as demand from gardeners for peat rises; and badgers are ‘culled’ in the face of clear science that says this is making the problem of bovine TB worse. Plastic pollution implacable where 'Not currently recycled' is apparently an acceptable euphemism for 'should not be allowed to be used by any manufacturer or supermarket'.

And the oceans have never been hotter.

Our mantra was once 'Think global, act local'. That now feels so unutterably naive.