Catrouble and accidental compost

A couple of years ago we developed a suspicion we had a squatter. Among the things that tipped us off were the hairs on the garden sofa cushions and the occasional strange looking lump of something dark red that we now assume are the undigested remains of birds that were too slow.

Last year, the squatter revealed himself as a truly unadulterated cat. He walks with the walk of a king surveying his kingdom, holds his head high and does not take crap from anyone. Until he met Vlad.

Vlad has been very territorial about the place from day one and even though he lacks the testosterone output of the squatter, whom we named Einstein for reasons that will become clear soon, he is not afraid to fight for what he considers his.

The first time they met, Einstein came to officially meet and greet the new addition, and ask to play. All three of us can swear that the cat is really comprehensible in its speech and we are three rather different people so you can trust us.

Vlad promptly chased him away that day. But Einstein persevered. He was so friendly and so sweet that he won us over…

Cris: Not me. One cat is enough.

…that he won two of us over and Vlad eventually accepted his right to exist in the space he considered his. The reason we named him Einstein (Cris One-Cat-Is-Enough did it) was that he is an impressively smart animal. And impressively friendly for a big, bad tom who terrorises any other cat he encounters.

We know because we’ve seen it. It seems, however, that he has made the conclusion that Vlad is a different case because he has people to feed him and pet him, and he might be worth having as s buddy. For this reason, after a short misunderstanding that saw Vlad chased up trees on two occasions (it was spring kitten-making season, after all, signals got mixed up), we now have this:

And this

Yesterday, they chased a third cat out of the place together. It’s good to see the kids happy.

Meanwhile, we’ve been hard at work ruining our compost pit because we keep adding stuff to it and don’t mix it anywhere near often enough. There is probably compost somewhere there deep down but to get to it we need to turn a few tonnes of currently rotting potato peels, garden tea remains, and orange peels.

Yet we lucked out when Cris began transferring dry twigs and weeds from a pile that was built specifically for that purpose: let them dry and then burn them in the designated fire spot in the middle of the garden.

The pile had been there for a couple of years. Weeds grew around it and through it. Apparently, they also died there, because when he transferred the contents of the pile what was revealed underneath was a thick layer of dark, rich, fertile-smelling, yes, compost. We immediately put it to good use in the beds and the plants seem to have loved it.

What you see on the left of the courgette there is one of the carrots Irina sowed in February, got tired of waiting for them to grow, wrote them off and put the courgettes in. A couple of weeks later — and three months after the sowing took place — the carrots revealed their presence. We didn’t know they were this sneaky.