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Blackbirds and Bogs!


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I've got 4 large pots out in the front garden, filled with a variety of pitchers bought over the years. They've done very well and always come back after winter. They used to be in the back garden, but the wife bought two pet rabbits, who discovered a taste for all plants carnivorous! I therefore had to move them out front.

They were doing ok until a few months back, when I would wake up and find something had been digging in the soil and flipping it over the lawn. Most of the plants survived, with the exception of my two sarracenia anglica :(

But what was going on? I tried putting long sticks in the soil, thinking it was a hedgehog, but nothing seemed to stop it. Every week or so, there would be holes in the soil. Thankfully I found no poo, so it wasn't a cat.

Then one morning I happened to glance out of the kitchen window, to see a blackbird merrily excavating one of the pots, flinging soil this way and that!

I looked online to see what people recommended. Coffee grounds in the soil was a favourite. No good to me of course. Then there was shiny CDs on string waving above the pots. That didn't work. But now I 've found something that does. I went down to Wilkinson Stores, and bought 4 rubber snakes, you know the type that kids play with. Cost me a £1 each. One in each pot and it seems to have done the trick. I haven't exactly seen a bird fly down, look startled and fly away, but the pots have been left alone ever since, and I envisage the birds sitting up on my roof looking down at my pots, each one with a terrifying new bird predator sitting amongst the leavings....waiting and watching!

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The really annoying thing is that we have 3 cats, who keep the back garden free of birds. But the cats never go on the front lawn where the bogs are, and I can't put the bogs in the back where the cats are....because of the rabbits!

Maybe I should consider poisoning the rabbits....

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Try standing the pots in the back garden on staging. The last I heard rabbits weren't that good at climbing. If all else fails try asking Glenn Close for a cookery lesson.

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I put a network of small wire mesh amidst my sarracenias, so that the blackbirds cannot access to the sphagnum or with great difficulties and I have almost no problems.

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Found a few of my freshly planted and young Heli unpotted today in my greenhouse. And all the moss they had been growing in gone!! Time to getting some netting over the door of the greenhouse. I had one similar incident last year, but in the 16 years that house has been up never had any issues before. Just lucky I suppose...

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I discovered that 3 ceph leaf pullings had rooted yesterday morning, as the pot had had the top inch pulled out and tossed about (blackbird style). The moss had kept it stuck together pretty much, so I could reassemble it. My only concern is that it had been tossed upside down with the roots of the pulling left blowing in the wind. I just hope they didnt get too damaged and I found them before they could dry out....

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