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Following my find of a dead swift in the flower bed, there have been a lot of blog comments on cats, and how welcome or unwelcome they are in the garden. So I just had to share the following, because I found it so comical. It is taken from a

Three out of the 16 raised beds up at the allotment are now looking a bit neater, thanks to the surplus pallet timber supplied by our neighbours. The beds were certainly due for an overhaul. The lower parts of the previous planks had turned to dark

need to do less sitting, and more cultivation. But it doesn't look too bad. I can see where the recent snow has pressed the netting down over the strawberry bed, and the canes from last year's French beans have blown over. But apart from that it doesn

of the garden beds.We have a regular gang of these fantastic birds wheeling about in the sky far above us, but they never come down low into the garden, nor do they ever perch on the fences or even the clothes line. I can't really envisage even the most agile

to be seen. My first inclination was to blame local 'youths'. Perhaps the same ones who had, a couple of years ago, started a camp fire next to our shed and ended up burning the whole place down. The netting over the bed was more or less in place, but I could

beds, so they must be breeding somewhere close by.It slowly made its way up the garden, and eventually disappeared under the dahlias. It did, however, stop briefly by Buster, peaking out of the guinea-pig run, and gave us the perfect opportunity

of wildlife. The back garden is just 30 square metres of close-mown lawn and the front garden has just a few neat beds of geraniums and some small decorative cypresses. It's a holiday bungalow, so the garden is kept to a maintenance-free minimum

It was blisteringly cold on Sunday, and the water butts were frozen over, but it was not a deep frost. So repairing and replacing the raised beds up at the allotment was relatively easy. The old scaffold planks we put in four or five years ago have

savoury plant in the beds, it also grows very well in cracks in the old concrete path.Later, while I'm admiring the constant nectaring business, I see there are several species. The red-tailed, Bombus lapidarius, is there in numbers, as too is the white

-cum-quay, the size of a single bed has been so enthusiastically decorated with plant containers that the table and chair are lost in herbage.Several hoverflies and bumblebees are visiting the flowers. Chaffinches and sparrows flit noisily through the climbers