Lodgers

This year I was bought a small greenhouse by friends to celebrate what they seem to think was a significant birthday, for which I am grateful and am very pleased to have after 20 odd years without one, didn’t realise how much I missed it.

Over the autumn, because I now have it and can over winter more sensitive plants in it, I have made up some planters with some of my potted sarracenia transplanted into them, ready for display next year and loaded them into the greenhouse to over winter. All good so far, but over the past three weeks, holes have been appearing in the soil in the planters as frogs have been burying themselves in them. I know it is frogs, as when I saw the holes I immediately thought, vermin Faulty, so flooded one of the planters and stood by with a fishing net over the hole in one hand and humane despatch device (brick end) in the other and waited for a long time. I thought all inside must be drowned, thereby creating more work as I would now need to empty the planter and remove the corpses before they enriched the soil, so I looked down the hole to see if anything had floated up, only to see a rather indignant looking reptile staring out, with a look on its face as if to say what did you do that for.

I have no gripe with the cold blooded critters, (apart from the one that emptied a tray of seedlings whilst attempting to go deeper, loosing about a dozen seedlings) so I can wait till they wake up and move on, but in all my years of gardening this is the first time that it has knowingly happened to me.

Cheers
Steve