For me, gardening is all about sharing. I’m not talking about letting all and sundry into your precious garden, that is your choice, but you can and should share your patch with the wildlife that would otherwise live where your home and garden now occupy.
My garden is alive with birds, insects, reptiles, amphibians and mammals. It is also a playground for my two elderly cats, next-door’s kittens, my dog and a small flock of ex battery hens.
All my ‘girls’ love the garden. The hens especially strut about as if they own the place, foraging for tasty morsels in and around the flowerbeds, chasing the dog and scaring next doors kittens. It’s a marvelous sight when you consider that when they first arrived they didn’t know what outdoors was, they had never seen grass and never felt the sun on their backs. It took a few weeks, but they gradually became less nervous, more adventurous and morphed into a charming group of feathery friends. Now very morning they loiter outside the back door, trilling and warbling away until I finally appear with their food. Not only do they eat a huge range of garden pests, but their fertile droppings, composted with their woodchip bedding, makes a fantastic and very rich fertiliser cum soil conditioner for my raised beds. Despite a fairly regular supply (they are getting old now) of delectable, golden yoked eggs. It’s not all win win.
My hens are very naughty. They peck the dog’s bottom, they hop into the kitchen if the door is open and eat his food and they have even been accused of soiling a garden trampoline (not mine and they were later found ‘not guilty’ of that charge, but I still love to visualize them bouncing up and down recklessly like drunken partygoers out for a good time).
