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Moving some bricks around the shed yesterday revealed one of my favourite spiders. With a narrow reddish-pink body 25 mm long and long rather slender legs, there is no mistaking the 'woodlouse' spider, Dysdera crocata. It makes no web, but hunts

; by the time she had four paws on the patio, the squirrel would be off up the fence and gone. She’d tried many times before, all to no avail.But her swishing tail made me look up at what was so agitating her. At first I could not quite make out what was going

are getting ready for the big planting session after half-term.There are precious few bugs about still. A small cloud of diaphanous winter gnats flutters above the shed but all else is quiet, until I pull up a small groundsel plant. There, wriggling

I think we have foxes living under our garden shed. I first noticed the scratching in the soil a week or so ago. It didn't look like very much excavation had occured and the hole didn't appear to go very far. But now we have more earth-moving going

elsewhere in the garden. Even raise a new wood stack around them. Anything found indoors, disturbed by the central heating, can be let go into an unheated shed or outhouse where they will settle back down again until temperature and day length switch

It rained on Sunday, so what better way to spend the day than planting roses? Well, I went and played Power Rangers in the bushes in Dulwich Park with 3-year-old, while my partner did the planting. She'd ordered them at Chelsea, and we'd almost

're probably breeding in the jungle-like ivy growth that threatens to engulf our shed further up the garden.A couple of hours later, the first speckled wood, Pararge aegeria, appears, looking velvety fresh. The likelihood is that it has just emerged from

the constant stream of large winged queens (and the slightly smaller males) take to the air for their mating flight. Up above, the swifts were having a bountiful harvest. I have only noticed the wingless queens this year, after they land and shed their wings

of the leaves when I spotted a ruddy brown bundle next to the ivy thicket. There was a fox asleep on the roof of the shed.It turned its head towards me as I cracked open the casement to take a picture. Not a very good one, I have to admit, I need a telephoto

stacked layers of old railway sleepers. It's not large, only 3.5 by 1.5 metres. And although it is over a metre deep in one corner, it shelves to nothing in another. Oh well, I'll just use the rest on the shed roof, where the roofing felt has ripped