Pe(s)t special

It has been a busy week at the Slav household. We had big sowing plans for this year and, for better or worse, the seeds can’t sow themselves, we had to do it. And we did. Then we watered the seeds. And then we secured them. Because we have pets that double as pests.

When we first moved here, we were happily ignorant of some aspects of a cat’s lifestyle in the country. We certainly knew it featured extended periods of wandering and fighting. What we didn’t think of at the time was that the country lifestyle also involved treating any patch of grass-free land as a toilet or a rolling spot (not the same patches, of course). So, when we sowed our new plants, we had to cat-proof them.

Yet the universe is generous with the challenges, so we also had to dog-proof them because neighbour Rottweiler Sara still treats our place as her very own local road to the wide world beyond. Like any reasonably intelligent creature, Sara would rather walk on a flat surface than a slope and the only flat surfaces in our garden are the veggie beds, which is why we lost our best Black Beauty courgette plant last summer, just as it was beginning to bear fruit and why our spinach beds look like this.

Essentially, it’s the pet-friendly variety of a barbed wire, actually made up of various discarded plant material that resulted from the autumn pruning and clearing season. We were planning to burn them. Instead, they came in really handy for pet-proofing the spinach beds. No dog would walk over this. And Vlad has not yet made an attempt to roll over it — there are easier-access rolling spots and cats don’t always like a challenge.

We’d readily admit this is not the most aesthetic look on a veggie bed but desperate times and all that, and also, it is not going to be permanent because those plants will grow. And when they do, it will be time for Stage 2 pet-proofing, as seen in the beans exhibit. (It’s really hard to see the brown twigs against the brown background of the brown ground but they’re there)

This is the approach we applied to the surviving courgettes after the Sara accident. We figured that the twigs would repel Miss Heavy Step and indeed, no more courgettes died until the end of the season. But we clearly missed something, namely the fact that until the plants appear, animals can with perfect easy step right where the seeds are to avoid the twigs. Those beans can’t sprout soon enough. The exhibit shows a Vlad print smack in the centre of the bean “nest”.

Yes, he stepped on the seeds a fraction of a second after we had watered them. But hey, at least he couldn’t roll over them. He also couldn’t roll over the patch where we sowed spring onions but it was not dog-proofed. It still isn’t but we’re banking on the fact the spot is not part of Sara’s route, judging by where we usually find the pawprints. And because we usually find the pawprints in the bed we have this year selected as the cucumber patch, we doubled down on the twigs.

This time we went longer and denser. No dog would bother trying to find a way to step inside the row. And that’s why humankind is the dominant species. We’re cunning. A cat would probably bother, just for kicks, which is why the twigs are longer than the ones we stuck around the beans. Bonus: we have ample supply of twigs from the not-quite trees growing here and there, and getting on our nerves. Waste not, want not and all that.

P.S. The peas are safe, at least. Peas go with poles.