The ground is moving with baby toads. They are even getting into our house. Emerging from our irrigation reservoirs and ponds in May and June, they quickly spread out over the whole farm. Sometimes it is hard to find a toad-free space to place your next step.
When I first planted strawberries 37 years ago, slugs took half the crop. A flock of ducks helped, but proved to be an easy meal for foxes, and were soon lost. Today, we lose less than 5% of our strawberries. I give most of the credit to those toads; given their numbers and voracious appetites, this is not a good place to be a slug.
Slugs are typically problematic in an organic farm’s first two years after giving up chemicals. After that, the ecology – both above and below ground – becomes so active and competitive that the slugs are predated or parasitised down to a level where they are seldom a major problem. Carabid beetles munch them, nematodes (very small worms) parasitize them… and then we have the toads. Hedgehogs were a common sight in my youth, and helpful slug eaters, but are now rare.
However well this agroecological approach works in field-scale growing, it does not seem to apply in a garden setting; with more slug-friendly plant cover, gardens seem to leave the slug on top. A small pond may help, but I suspect the emerging toads migrate away too quickly. Ducks work well if you can handle the poo.
It looks like being a dismal year for ash trees. After ten years of fighting off the fungal disease ash die-back, most have finally succumbed. Foresters predict that the UK will lose 85% of its ash – but hope is emerging. Work at Kew Gardens suggests that, even in the 13 years that the disease has been recorded in the UK, natural selection is favouring a change in ash genetics towards resistance. Ash trees are prolific seed bearers; this, combined with the seedlings being challenged early by the disease as they emerge through infected leaf litter on the forest floor, has helped the ash to develop resistance much faster than elms managed with Dutch elm disease 50 years ago.
In the meantime, sycamore trees are replacing ash on the farm at an astonishing rate. Ecologists tell me that sycamores provide similar ecological services (such as habitats) to ash; nature can adapt to a lot, if we don’t throw too much at it, too fast.
Our News from the Farm posts come from Riverford. They are the digital versions of the printed letters which go out to customers, every week via Riverford’s veg boxes. Guy Singh-Watson’s weekly newsletters connect people to the farm with refreshingly honest accounts of the trials and tribulations of producing organic food, and the occasional rant about farming, ethical and business issues he feels strongly about.
We had a hedgehog that visited when we first moved here. Alas, last year it came no more – & boy could we have done with it last summer! We’d welcome a toad or two, but are hoping that the froglets that developed from the spawn & tadpoles in our pond this spring will grow big enough to take on some of the smaller beasties at least. Meanwhile this is our 5th summer of being organic, so I’m hoping that the soil, etc, will sort things too. Though we won’t be having ducks – a wildlife cam has revealed that foxes pass through regularly. I wondered what had been snuffling around in the Veg Patches!