feeding the five thousand » Miranda Hodgson

With the key to the garden door now in my possession, I made my first proper foray into the garden this week. For some time before taking on this garden, I’d had my eye on the big compost heap against the north facing wall. Whilst it is hidden from the big house, I can see it from the kitchen window and have wondered for many months what it contains, so it was with a sense of both satisfaction and anticipation that I approached it, fork at the ready. The top layer was made up of grass cuttings and I dreaded finding a heap of smelly, anaerobic sludge, but underneath this top layer was a mix of grass cuttings and the prunings of perennial border plants and, much to my pleasure, a great many worms.

These are compost worms, of the Eisenia species, and they are busy breaking down the heap into usable compost, so their presence is very welcome; I hope to find some ready to use compost further down. On putting my fork to soil in the borders, I have my fingers crossed that I’ll find plenty of worms there too (these will be Lumbricus rubellus, which prefer to live in soil rather than compost heaps, pulling plant debris beneath the soil). There is certainly enough organic matter on the surface to keep them happy!

Walking along the long border and looking at the rather bedraggled remains of last year’s perennials, I spotted the first ladybirds of spring, warming themselves in the sun; they are very welcome too as they and their larvae will help to keep the garden clear of aphids.

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We have been offered the use of the walled garden outside our kitchen window. This is in addition to the large courtyard we already use and the garden, on a nearby farm, where we grow vegetables.

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Up at the garden this week, we heard the sound of a male Great Spotted Woodpecker hammering its beak against a tree. They do this to announce their presence in the area and can batter against a tree trunk up to 40 times a second, which makes you wonder why they don’t get headaches. If we did that, our brains would swirl around inside our skulls and we would soon be unconscious and, even if we weren’t unconscious, then we’d probably be very uncomfortable and no doubt quite cross as well. Fortunately, nature has provided woodpeckers with an efficient shock absorbing system, which means that their brains are able to absorb the blows, avoiding concussion, so allowing them to hammer away as much as they want to.

There are plenty of trees around the garden for the woodpeckers to hammer against, but some woodpeckers have discovered that they can make a louder drumming by using telegraph poles instead of trees. I first discovered this several years ago, when I was wakened at first light by the sound of the bedroom radiator vibrating. This happened on several mornings during the next couple of weeks and, initially, I was mystified at what could be causing it.

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What better way to recuperate after minor surgery than a spot of light gardening and wildlife watching. Fresh air, sunshine and gentle exercise certainly take your mind off things; you end up feeling incredibly virtuous and may even pick up new knowledge along the way. So it was that, after a day’s garden pottering, I discovered on returning home that, according to the Natural History Museum, the UK has some 37 species of woodlouse. In all, there are over 3,000 species and some of them even live in the sea. Bet you didn’t know that.

Anyway, it was after helping someone to remove a clump of pampas grass (actually, all I did was cut back the foliage) that I looked down into the hole left after rolling the root ball out of the way and saw an especially large and fine looking woodlouse. It was one of the biggest I’d ever seen and, unlike many other woodlice I’ve come across, this one had a pale fringe around its shell and spots of the same colour along the length of its body. It was beautiful, a tiny living work of art.

The ground here was damp and shady – not a good place for a pampas grass and the plant wasn’t thriving; in fact, half of it was rotting and quite smelly, so it wasn’t surprising that woodlice had set up house there.

They breathe through gills, so a soggy, rotting plant would be ideal. I thought back to other woodlice I’ve seen and dug out a picture taken a few years before of a smaller, brown one that I’d seen in a compost bin, which had appeared to be in discussion with a slug. They were quite different.

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It’s the same every day at the moment. The first job of the morning is to put out bird food, dump the half an inch of ice in their water dish and refill it. There is a growing pile of ice next to the dish and it doesn’t look like melting any time soon, but the cold weather doesn’t stop the birds from bathing. Imagine it - bathing outside, during mid-winter, in cold water. It may not seem quite rational to us, but the birds need to bathe to keep their feathers in good condition, so winter baths are vital.

If you want to get fancy, you can buy thermostatically controlled water heaters for bird baths, but there are other, cheaper methods. A small ball floating on the surface of the water helps some of it stay ice-free, as does a night-light candle under the bath (which needs to be protected from breezes). Here, I sit the bath in the top of a black plastic pot of insulating compost. It still freezes during the night, but stays ice-free in the day time.

While other parts of the country have had impressive falls of snow, in Oxfordshire we have had the merest dusting, less than the sprinkling of icing sugar you’d get on a sponge cake, so we took pleasure in visiting family in Lincolnshire for Christmas, where they’d had proper snow. The snow in the garden was untrodden by humans, until I got there anyway, but on going to look around, I saw the tracks of both cats and rabbits and noticed that the rabbits used the same well-trodden (or hopped?) routes, while the cats’ tracks showed that they tended to wander about more.

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