A June Jaunt.

WOW!!!!!!!!!!! i would love to live there it's great put out some gopher pellets near the holes and it will help with badger?

My kind of garden.

Thank you for the tour, Ob - you have some lovely plants in a really gorgeous garden. Sending sympathy re the badger :((

WOW Fantastic

Gosh and I thought i had badger-tulip problems! Great tour as usual. Favourites this time are the heartbreakingly blue iris and the grass paths that disappear from view round the bend - very inviting!

Oh I do love my jaunts around your garden O'boggy, I've been trying to figure out which part is missing, thats a lot of bulbs to lose beside the damage, have you had problems in the past, I don't remember you ever mentioning badgers before.
I think I might have already said but your garden is wonderful, I'm drooling here at all your plants in the g'house as well, thankyou for sharing it all again O'b and I hope you get the badgers sorted somehow...
Wonderful photo's...

Beautiful garden! For the badger problem you might try placing wooden stakes at intervals across your bed and tying a cord across the top of the stakes. From the cord every couple of ft. hang an shiny aluminum pie plate. Badgers are very skitterish and the sight of these plates moving around in the breeze should keep them away or make them so uneasy that they won't stay too long this works day and night. A farmer friend of mine does this in his vegetable beds and it seems to work well for him in keeping away all kinds of hungry animals and birds. He also uses strips of Mylar and even old CD's (gets these by the basket full at flea markets). Heavy fishing line can be used to tie these things on.

Thanks folks.
We have fastened strips of plastic sacks to the fencing which we have added in the hope that it will stop them climbing over.
Not sure about protecting just that one bed as then they would just move on to another one and carry on damaging there and at the moment they have only attacked one area.
Finding their entry point is proving difficult as there is a very weedy, nettle and bramble filled wild life strip of about 3 metres all the way down the field side of the garden. It makes getting to the fence rather painful and we are not really supposed to interfere with this strip.
Love to know why after 20 years of peaceful co-existence they have suddenly done this.

Most likely a badger population increase is the reason for their widening their food source territory. Where I live we are having a similar problem with a what I can only term an explosion in our mink population which has totally cleaned the fish out of garden ponds, including mine (lost over 50 fish and not one left) for miles around. Never ever had this problem before and with this superior hunter there is no solution other than waiting until they deplete this new found food source and move on or die out.

We had a similar problem here a few years back. Some idiots broke into a mink farm and released the animals into the wild. they cleaned out the river which is just below us of everything, including the endangered water rats. Lots of the mink also dies of starvation as they were caged animals they had no idea how to hunt.
The river is just about recovering now after 5 years of no mink being seen.
Just added plastic strips to another length of fencing. Had to stop, my back is giving me trouble at the moment.
Trouble with living near wild life I suppose. I don't wish the badgers any harm, just wish they would leave us alone.

as usual your garden looks amazing. sorry to hear of the badger troubles. do you remember Spritzhenry had a similar problem. she used jeyes fluid too.

too many plants to pic a fav though I do love the different irises.

Spritzhenry is still having problems with them, but they are just tunnelling and digging rather than eating things.

What a smashing collection of plants Owdboggy.
I sympathise regarding the badger damage.they can destroy garden as a friend of mine has seen. The holes u dear his garden have caused so much damage including pence posts/panels collapsing.