mice

Now it is cooling down outside, the mice have sought warmer shelter - in our house. I forget how many houses we have dealt with this in. Our terraced home in London was by far the worst as they lived inside all the time and appeared to move from home to home along the terrace. The ate anything and weren't the slightest bit scared of humans. Here there are fewer mice, they are scared of me, less intrepid and altogether more manageable. My Dad and Grandad have both advised us to put down rat and mouse poison bait. They find our comments about toxicity in the soil and our horror of a child finding it and eating it less than compelling but that's okay because Favourite Handyman and I are big kids now and get to decide ourselves. We're not cat lovers and we are near-cat-sneezers so that rules cats out. Plus it's hard to get them to catch and eat mice but not birds. Or to catch the blackbirds but not the native birds.

So at our place our main strategy is traps plus keeping food in mouse-proof containers. The modern kind of traps are very easy to deal with. The mice don't splatter (FH tells me horror stories of being sent up to deal with rat traps and rat splatter in the ceiling as a teenager), I'd say death is fairly prompt and you don't have to touch the mouse when emptying the trap. We've caught three this week.

What else today? Planted six swiss chard seedlings on the edges of the invasive garden and six kale seedlings across two established beds. All from our friendly local garden nursery. My own weren't the size I wanted for planting straight away. I still have some seedlings of my own for planting out in another ten days or so. I am now growing three kinds of swiss chard: Ironman silverbeet, Argentata beet and Rainbow Chard.

Favourite Handyman has started to harvest the tobacco. Two plants' worth are hanging from the ceiling of one of the garden sheds now. He also repotted some flax and cabbage tree plants a friend gave him. I don't actually want cabbage trees in this garden but at least while they are in pots we have some flexibility.