Blackbirds - do you love them or hate them?

Latest post from MARKSVEGPLOT – a blog about food and gardening in England”

In general I’d say I’m a lover of Nature, but there are certain times when certain aspects of Nature are a PITA. Right now, my gripe is with Blackbirds.

Singing sweetly late on a Summer’s evening, the Blackbird can be a charming creature, but most of the time these birds seem to be arguing vociferously with their neighbours / rivals, or (more likely) destroying my little plants! To be fair, they don’t deliberately set out to destroy my plants; they just do so as a consequence of their endless scratching around in the compost, looking for insects to eat.

Their favourite places to carry out these searches seem to be the edges of my raised beds, and lots of my seedlings have become casualties as a result. This is the main reason why I have invested a fair bit of cash in netting and mechanisms for supporting it, so that I can make structures like this:

This most recently-erected structure is now protecting my Salads bed, currently hosting lettuces, radishes and beetroot – all at the small, vulnerable seedling stage.

In the next-door bed I have my Broad Beans, one row of which are supported by 5-foot bamboo canes, making it impractical to use a net. As a low-level deterrent to the Blackbirds I have lain some stout pieces of scrap wood along the edges of the bed. Whether as a result my Radishes will survive is a moot point.

I had a similar row of Radishes along the other side of this bed, next to the first row of BBs, and about 50% of them have been lost to Blackbird damage (although I think squirrels are partly to blame too).

Since I’ve mentioned Broad Beans, I want to finish today with a photo of some Broad Bean flowers.

These ones appear to have long mascara’d lashes.

To read more articles like this, on Gardening and Gastronomy, please visit * http://marksvegplot.blogspot.com/ *