Country Mouse on gardening
Mark finds himself glad to put his vegetable garden to bed for the winter, and notices a large number of undesirables have moved in


Having harvested the last runner bean from a tired and straggly plant, the final bounty from the vegetable garden, I tore into the soil and piled up a huge mound of foliage on the compost heap.
During those several hours thrashing around the garden (have you noticed how you start gardening in spring with all the tenderness of a new marriage and finish divorcing yourself from the whole mess the place has grown into?), I became aware that, like poor old Toad in The Wind In The Willows, my property had become home to huge numbers of undesirables.
Toad had weasels, but I’ve got squirrels, rats that have made their way in from the harvested fields, magpies, white-eyed jackdaws wheeling their way around the chimneys, and a visiting fox, which, despite seeing me, still gave the empty chicken run a onceover.
The place is a den of iniquity, and a better balance between the killers and the songbirds will have be sorted out. I don’t believe in feeding birds during the summer (does anyone still have their milk-bottle lids taken off by blue tits or have they lost the knack?), although I do try and help out in the colder months but first the vermin will have to be tackled.
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Country Life is unlike any other magazine: the only glossy weekly on the newsstand and the only magazine that has been guest-edited by HRH The King not once, but twice. It is a celebration of modern rural life and all its diverse joys and pleasures — that was first published in Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee year. Our eclectic mixture of witty and informative content — from the most up-to-date property news and commentary and a coveted glimpse inside some of the UK's best houses and gardens, to gardening, the arts and interior design, written by experts in their field — still cannot be found in print or online, anywhere else.
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