Hoist with my own petard

It’s all my fault, I thought, as I surveyed the remains of my purple sprouting broccoli, my fault for saying (in ‘Living together’) that we should welcome nature into our houses and gardens.

It was my second attempt at growing broccoli. The first lot I’d grown from seed and then potted up too soon. The little plants had never recovered, so I next bought a tray of seedlings from the garden centre. I left them uncovered for twenty-four hours before potting them up, thinking that they were too small to be of interest to the cabbage white butterfly. I was wrong. Even though I’d subsequently netted the pots (after I potted up the seedlings), the butterflies had obviously got there first, and now a host of caterpillars was munching its way through the crop.

On the soil around each stalk were strange jewel-like deposits. Were these the eggs of yet more caterpillars?

Either the plants would recover, or they wouldn’t, I thought. I might as well now practise what I’d preached, un-net the pots and let the birds enjoy the wee small beasties.

Then birds started invading the house. First, according to Frog, a wren had appeared while I was out walking the dog. It wasn’t there when I got home so it must have escaped through a window. Instead a robin now entered the kitchen and, after flying around banging itself against walls, perched on top of the microwave, which lives on top of the fridge as there’s nowhere else for it. It’s lucky both Frog and I are tall.

Usually, we reckon that birds arrive to tell us when they’ve run out of food, but all the feeders were full and this bird just sat there looking stunned. We wondered if it was a young one that didn’t quite know what it was doing.

Frog, who’s good with errant birds (and errant bees), stood on a stool and enticed it on to his finger.

We then took it out to the caterpillar-infested pots, thinking that we could ‘kill two birds with one stone’ – reduce the population of caterpillars and feed this poor lost creature. Frog even put some of the beasties on to his hand and put his hand under the bird’s beak.

The robin ignored them. It didn’t move. It just sat there looking miserable.

So we left it alone and when I went back half an hour later it was gone. The caterpillars were still there unfortunately and had started falling off the pots and drowning in the water left in the tray by torrential rain.

In my last act of nature conservation, I took the pots out of the tray, tipped the water out and returned the pots to the tray. That way, I thought, both the caterpillars and the plants might stand a chance.