Hey, Johnboy, maybe you could breed leeches for blood letting? I believe they are used again in hospitals.

Hopefully, you'll get an answer, Alan, because we too found a headless corpse, a young blackbird, in the garden, the rest of the body completely undamaged, just the head gone. We thought it might be a cat which had been disturbed but that would have played with the bird first, no doubt, and made a m...

I bought a bag of Levingtons potting compost earlier this year (not growbags) and wasn't happy with the proportion of unrotted wood chippings in it, so I have bought Arthur Bowers compost and growbags since then. I really like the look and feel of Arthur Bowers' stuff and, so far, everything seems t...

Like you suspected, Beryl, there seems to be more to it than appeared on the radio, as I read in the paper today. The chap had two allotments and only grew vegetables and fruit on a very small proportion of them. The remaining part was left to grow wild (no, doubt, lovely for the local bird and inse...

Rhubarb stick, I would try the netting again. We have bird problems though it's usually partridges, pheasants and jackdaws rather than pigeons, and we build a sort of fruit cage over the whole of the brassica bed and the whole of the pea and broad bean bed. We bought a huge anti-bird net from LBS (l...

Has anybody noticed how late the ash trees are in coming into leaf? At least they are in our area and the oak trees are already nicely green. If the saying "Oak before ash, in for a splash, ash before oak, in for a soak" is really true, we should be getting a scorcher this year! The rain t...

Hello, Parsons Jack, so glad you are with us again! Have a good holiday and when you come back you'll be singing "Im Weissen Rossl am Wolfgangsee ....", no doubt! Our first potatoes (Charlotte), grown in potato bags are also just starting to flower, so I'll have a poke around in the bag so...

Nice to have you back, Lizzie, and glad your are very much on the mend!

It's funny how one misses "old" forum friends, isn't it? Has anybody heard from or about parsonsjack from Kent? Have not seen him about for a long time, hope he is ok.

A few years ago, a robin nested in our greenhouse, having got in through one of the slightly open top flap. We watched her sit on the eggs, the eggs hatching, the young being fed, all at close quarters, whilst carrying on with the usual greenhouse work! When the four young were ready to fledge, I ha...

Many thanks for all your comments. Yes, Primrose, I think my grandsons are learning the lesson the hard way. In both the cases I mentioned, it was sheer inexperience, it seems, both drivers had only recently passed their tests and drink or drugs were not involved. One of my grandsons was particularl...

Same here, particularly in the strong northeasterly winds the last few days - not an insect in sight. I wondered if I could go through the broad beans (we only grow a few earlies, the rest are still quite small) and pollinate them with a paint brush?

Yesterday a young girl died and a lad is in a critical condition after their car left the road and went into the local Leeds-Liverpool Canal, one lad was saved. At the same spot, in very similar circumstances, two young girls lost their lives when their car overturned into the canal late at night an...

I do hope you didn't discover a lot more damage, OH, and the three miscreants also got their just desserts! It's been exceedingly windy here for the last two days (although no tornado!), the road into Skipton looked like autumn, all covered in leaves which had been blown off the trees. We are hoping...

Plumpuddding, the dry stone wall is nearly 6 foot high and very densely covered with ivy on both sides. It must have dozens of old nests in it, particularly of blackbirds, robins, song thrushes and dunnocks, which have nested in there in the 30 years we have lived here! So we hope it will survive. U...

We have had a dunnocks' nest in the middle of our rhubarb patch in the past. It made harvesting the rhubarb difficult because we did not know exactly where the nest was (just saw the birds carrying food into the greenery), but we found it when the rhubarb died down in autumn. This year there's been ...