This was a bad, soggy winter. Perhaps they all will be from now onwards. It was January before I put in the bean seeds at the far end, far corner of the garden. I planted three rows; more than I need, but it is surprising how many of one’s friends drop by for tea when the broad beans are ripe. I went away for a few days to visit my aunt (yes, I still have an aunt. When she was sixteen, she used to push me around in a pram). Returning, I inspected the vegetable beds. All seemed well … until I reached that far corner. The destruction was absolute and prints in the wet mud spoke of the guilty party. Each bean plant must have reached five centimetres high whereupon a rat had pulled up the plant and eaten what remained of the bean seed beneath. They must have had a feast – only one seedling escaped.
The seeds had been the surplus of last year’s crop. Luckily, there were enough left to replant. This time I used a trick learned from a neighbour, soaking the seeds in diesel. Rats and mice don’t like the smell: that’d sort them out. Now the far corner stank heavily of fuel. But, checking the bed a few days later, I found the rats had decided that the smell was not horrid enough to ruin the nice taste of broad bean. This time they didn’t have to wait for the seedling to break the surface – the diesel proved a perfect guide to where each bean seed lay. They had eaten the lot. This was beyond a joke. By now, I had run out of last year’s seeds, but some friends, phoning on their way to a garden centre, offered to buy some more for me. It turned out that, being late in the year for much demand for broad bean seeds, all that was left was a single packet of a dwarf variety. That should be fine – beans is beans, after all. To avoid all the rodent dramas, I decided to plant them in pots on the windowsill of my fine new house. That was ideal. The seeds germinated and, when I decided the plants were tall enough to have left nothing in the way of a tasty bean underground, I transplanted them all to the garden. Soon the smell of bean flowers filled the air.
Sounds like a happy ending, doesn’t it? The flowers faded and the beans began to swell. The main enemies were now mice rather than rats. The mass of bean pods was too much of a temptation. Every morning, I would find young beans nibbled off the plants, the pods torn open and the beans eaten – not the whole bean. Avoiding the thick skin that covers each bean, they just ate the contents. It wasn’t a total disaster. I did manage to get a few beans – the ones from higher up each plant. The poor mice must have suffered from vertigo and couldn’t face climbing to the top ones. This problem of rats and mice taking out the seedling and devouring the bean seed from which it grew was a totally new experience for me. No one else seemed to have suffered it, either. I mentioned the problem to a friend living a kilometre away whose beans were as late as mine. She had never heard of such an attack. Then, a week later, she reported that the same thing had happened to her beans. There must be little mousey Einsteins who develop these genius skills and pass them on to their friends. It will be interesting to see whether this new attack, once learned, is remembered for next year’s bean crop!
Sometimes, of a fine summer evening, I go fishing, towing a lure behind a battered old, three-metre-long rowing boat, pulled up at nearby Chapmans Pool. It is a pleasant way of making a bit of exercise useful, often yielding a mackerel or a pollack for supper. Even without any catch, rowing along that stretch of coast is a fine way to pass an evening and my preferred pub lies halfway between the boat and home.
A couple of months ago, there was a new catch. The fair-sized pollack on the line seemed unusually passive. While taking it off the hook, I found it had a large parasite, almost 4 cm long, embedded into its flesh. The jointed armour along its back indicated some form of crustacean. It was difficult to remove, since a double rank of sharp, hooked claws was firmly embedded into the flesh, leaving a bloody row of punctures. There was another, smaller but similar beast next to it. Questioning Mr Google, these proved to be isopods, a vampire variety of giant woodlouse, parasitic on fish. The larger beast was the female, filling herself with blood to support a brood of young. The smaller one was her mate. Together, they had enfeebled the pollack. Certainly, I had never seen such a creature before. It was described as a warm water parasite: another treasure from global warming?
To round off an account of the horrors of country life, what about a hedgehog? These funny little spiney mammals used to be commonplace. Folk encouraged them into their gardens with an occasional snack – was it bread and milk? – a change from their diet of snails and slugs so loathed by gardeners. They were quite well able to protect themselves, on the approach of an enemy, by rolling into a prickly ball. Traffic put paid to that. It is no good forming a ball to discourage a car. Through my youth they were a common sight, squashed on the road – so common, that they soon became a rarity. A dead hedgehog beside the road last week was sufficiently unusual for me to stop to photograph it.
Even I don’t escape British high summer Scot-free, spending every July-August coughing. Often, I am rendered virtually speechless – which some unfriendly friends consider an improvement.