Watering the rabbits
I have complained before about some of the problems we have in the garden. The longest running problem is water, or lack of it, and the current problem is rabbits - we have an excess of them.
So it is high time to buckle down and sort both of these problems out. We are lucky enough to have a water-source in the ‘garden’ (field) might be a better words, hundreds of years old and set into an attractive arched niche in a stone wall. We are unlucky, because it is 100 metres from the house.
Until we arrived this was the only water source for the property, used for everything from drinking water to washing out the cow-shed, so I am pretty confident it won’t run out too soon. We are softies and changed to a town supply of water rather than risk drinking a litre of pesticides a day, but the water is still there, waiting to be used. So I have installed a water-pump, some long hose, and 100 metres of electricity cable. Amazingly it works, at least for the potager next to the water supply, although I haven’t run hoses back up to the main gardens yet, so I don’t know if it will have enough pressure to do that (quite a challenge, there are a couple of acres of ‘formal’ gardens, up to 250 metres from the water).
Anyway, that’s cheered up Mrs B, the gardener, since she will need to do less carting around of watering cans if and when a hosepipe ban arrives, a job that can easily take an hour or two a day, just keeping new plants watered until they have a foothold and watering the enormous number of pots that we have got spread around the courtyard.
Funny thing is, the pump came with a long tube to stick down the well from where the water gets sucked up. Pretty reasonable, you would think. Well, the pipe is made of light plastic and floats on the surface, so gets plenty of air as well and also sucks up any dead beasties or leaves that are floating around on the surface. So in a moment, I’m off to strap a big piece of iron onto the end of the pipe to hold it under water - not difficult, but couldn’t the manufacturers have thought of that?
The rabbit problem is proving slightly harder. There are parts of the ‘garden’ where I can go early in the morning and see four or five happily playing on the grass. This is less of a problem than you would think - the vast majority of plants get ignored by the rabbits, and we haven’t yet needed to wire cage everything.
But, curiously, certain plants do attract them like a magnet. Can’t tell you which - that’s Mrs B’s department - but there is one in particular that was only planted a couple of months ago. Every night the rabbits dig it out, and every morning Mrs B replants it. They don’t even nibble the leaves, they just dig it out and toss it aside. Kind of a game for them I suppose. Anyway Mrs B has now made a circle of rocks all around it to keep the rabbits off, which seems to help.
She has used this ‘ring of rocks’ approach on quite a few plants, which means parts of the garden look like one of those curious 1970’s rockeries (much loved in UK suburbia before Alan Titchmarsh turned up with his decking). This is a bit out of charcter in rural France, but I guess they will go after the plants are established, and looks better than chicken wire.
Footnote: I saw a fox in the garden this morning, presumably attracted by the rabbit population, so that might be an end to that particular problem anyway.
