pumpkinstrokemarrow

Still pondering about how to keep the deer out of the allotment. Plan A was to eat them. Apart from the technical difficulty of catching them a bigger problem was the high proportion of veggies/animal lovers around here. None of whom seem to be in the least concerned by the amount of damage that deer do. (But I am not alone. Even the Daily Telegraph is running correspondance on how to deal with them). Plan B was to erect my very own six foor deer fence around the fruit trees - about 50 yards worth. Which would have cost the equivalent of many years' worth of fruit and a week or more's time. Plus maybe damage so not so robust back. So plan C was that maybe it will be cheaper and quicker to check the existing six foot fence around the whole allotment site - the catch being that some of it disappears into bramble thickets and such like.

Have discounted the theory that the deer are getting in through the culvert from Stamford Green. This looks to be about two foot in diameter and fifty yards long. I don't think a deer would go through such a thing unless chased or frightened. Perhaps just as well because while I first thought that it would be easy enough to block off the culvert using chicken wire or some such, such a blockage would soon block up with (Autumn) debris. Maybe even a modest flood on Stamford Green? In any event it seemed likely that someone would find something to complain about.

Walking around yesterday observed that there was a fairly new stretch of fence about where I vaguely remember a tree falling down and taking a chunk out. Job done! Then I saw a deer in the neighbouring school field. Turned my back for a few minutes and there it was in the allotment field, bold as brass. So job not quite done yet. Inspection will have to continue.

Catering matters relatively quiet at the moment. Today's challenge is the construction of stuffing for a chicken without the benefit of fresh sage - recently dug up, as reported on 6th instant. Nor are there any hazel nuts and I am not at all sure if walnuts will be a very satisfactory alternative. Using frozen bread to make the breadcrumbs, but that should not be a problem. So long as one does not cheat and use a food mixer which turns out breadpowder rather than breadcrumbs. There is also the temptation to let too much crust in which does nothing for the colour of the end product. Brown bread even worse. We will see how we get on.

Rather wet to continue digging. Also rather warm for killing off bugs as is proper at this time of year. Said to be the warmest November since records began.

Labels: stamford green deer

After much cogitation have now decided to go for the deer fence and now have around £150 worth of materials to erect the fence with. Decided against a strand of barbed wire along the top - apparently a good deterent at the margin - mainly on the grounds that I do not need 200m of the stuff. Decided against the hole digging contraption (two long handled narrow bladed spades mounted roughly as scissors. Ram the thing in, clamp the handles together and pull up the cylindrical plug of clay) - mainly on the grounds that £45 +VAT was a lot to pay for a toy I will probably only get to use once or twice. As it is I will not get a very good return in terms of fruit but I am sure I will in other ways. Decided against stock fencing in favour of chicken netting. The former is heavier guage wire which would have laster longer and been better proof against the council grass butchers but would also have been heavy and awkward to manage (tends to behave like a spring when you try to unroll it) and it had large holes which deer could poke their muzzles through - far enough to grab things that they shouldn't.

Started cogitation about whether to do a registry edit to stop Microsoft remembering passwords - which I don't like on a shared, open access computer. Rather to my surprise it was easy enough to find out how to do this but the instructions come with all kinds of health warnings about how you might have to reinstall windows if you get it wrong. The support team at the Treasury used to do this sort of thing routinely but I have never done it. Pity I havn't got a spare computer I don't care about to play with.

Raided the sprog2 DVD trunk for something called descent last night. Not bad at all and had me completely convinced that the thing had been made in the Appalachians using a real large cave. BH viewed the beard material that comes with the DVD and it turns out the thing was made entirely in England, mostly in a smallish room in the Pinewood Studios. Wonderful stuff polystyrene! Horror plot fairly straighforward, with the interesting update on the lady front. Instead of busty blondes being ravished by dashing middle European aristo vampires you had a team of atheletically enabled young ladies indulging in bonding and then getting knocked off by undergound humanoids. Maybe a more third millenium way to pull the femail (or female?) audiences. The only catch was that they all looked much the same to me, especially when they were crawling around in the dark covered in goo. Made it quite hard to follow the bonding side of things.

Starting to get the hang of this MP3 lark and am now the proud owner of 9 playlists. Not so convinced that the laptop is up to the second batch though- Beethoven violin sonatas - not doing so well with two instruments at once as with one. So next step when I get bored with the fence is to work out how to pump MP3 through my existing amplifier...

Perhaps rather foolhardy but cycled to Cheam on Thursday morning. Wind not too bad although caught by a hefty cross wind coming down Howell Hill. This morning quite a lot of small trees down so must have got a lot worse later in the day - as it did in Epsom when I was actually brought to a halt in my own road coming back from the bank.

An expedition which reminded me that Halifax have some way to go before they are a real bank. Great old flapdoodle about withdrawing cash whereas HSBC just get the money out of a drawer and give it to you. The last occasion was when Halifax seemed unable to process a foreign cheque in a foreign currency.

Deer fence now half up. Reminded when it was too late how hard it is to get the line wires even - the way I have done it the last line makes the first look slack. Also managed to buy two differant weights of line wire. The heavier stuff at 2.5mm is a swine to handle with a remarkable tendency to get in a tangle. Again too late, remembered that untangling things by pulling ends through loops is apt to make things worse. The door posts not quite parallel despite best efforts with level - but at least the door fits in the hole even if it does show up the lack of parallelism. Had to chop a few inches off the path outside the fence so that it opened; hopefully it will grass over again. Half way through hanging the first run of chicken wire and finger tips rather the worse for wear - the ends of tie wire being rather sharp after cutting. Like the line wire, hard to get the chicken wire even but it will probably look OK when it is all up. Probably easier when one is doing a long run with proper buttressed posts and wire tensioners. But mustn't moan: definately good fun putting it up - much more so than having to do it for real out on a moor in a howling gale! Maybe finish the job this weekend.

First run of chicken wire hung, second and upper run up and half tied. Just got the lower ties to put in. The activity was enlivened and speeded up by assistance of BH acting as apprentice and by construction of a Heath-Robinson like contraption to facilitate the unrolling of chicken wire a metre up in the air. Need for contraption arising from the considerable weight of a 50 metre roll of the stuff and it's tendency to crease when bent. Very hard to get the creases out. Picture of contraption to follow in due course; hopefully on next sprogvisit. Not so sure about a picture of the fence itself as the chicken wire is surprisingly invisible in some lights: so let's hope the deer have good eyes. Maybe I should string some of the crime scene police tape I found somewhere around it to improve visibility. Also odd how differant the fruit trees look from inside the cage; entirely differant feel to them. Much more domestic and orchard like than it was before.

Have been given a bare root vine. Stuck it in at the end of the clematis fence. We will see if we get any grapes - and whether they are eatable. Maybe they will wind up in chutney like the surplus plums.

Visited by some would-be allotment trusties today. They are busy setting up some cross Epsom allotment garden coordinating committee to harass the council to do better - or better still (and this seems to be the flavour of the month) to make all the allotment gardens into self governing outfits more or less free of the council. Not so sure about the merit of this last at all. The council don't do a bad job as it is and I am not sure I want some busy trusties patrolling the allotments every Sunday making remarks about the state of ones verges. There used to be one of these when I had an allotment near Friern Barnet (mental hospital to one side, heavy duty isolation unit the other) and he accounted for the one time I was seriously tempted to clobber someone with a spade. Quite a scary experience (for me).

Three senior moments between the two of us in the last few days: one of which was to put the boiling water in the tea cup rather than in the tea pot. The other two have vanished - which is not good considering one was rather spectacular and the other was only a few minutes ago. Still, it could be worse - and maybe I will remember what they were when I log out.

Postcript on the recent bonfire. After the rain there was pretty much nothing left, just a few bits of charcoal. No great lumps at all. Not bad at all given that we left the fire when it was still just about in flame, a glowing heap about three foot across and one foot high.