My mum lives in a row of terraced houses, each with a small garden in front. During the beautiful snow-days that we got in January of this year, she decided to go for a walk down along the terrace.
As she came out her front door, she noticed bird-tracks all over the thick drifts of snow that were covering the garden. This was no surprise. She’s a big bird fan. She hangs bird feeders and cultivates an array of bright-flowering shrubs in the garden, all designed to attract these little flashes of beauty.
As she walked past other houses on the terrace however, she noticed that there were many gardens where the snow was absolutely pristine, without a single track to mar the surface. She reached the bottom of the road, turned around and came back. She was not mistaken; some gardens were utterly untouched by the birds, a feature brought into stark contrast when she passed the occasional garden where the tracks of many busy visitors were clearly evident.
She told me about her observation and we could only conclude that she had witnessed a form of natural tagging;
that the presence of bird tracks clearly differentiated between gardens that were coated in poisonous insecticides and herbicides and those that were chemical-free.
In The Running Hare, John Lewis-Stempel describes much the same phenomenon. The book is a description of his project to take a modern, conventionally farmed arable field, four acres in size, and to plough it and husband in the old-fashioned chemical-free way, turning it into a traditional wheatfield. He refers to the field as Flinders, after a long ago owner, and he erects a bird table in one corner.
For the month of January I decide I’ll spend fifteen minutes a day observing the birds on the table, and fifteen minutes noting the birds in Flinders, plus the adjoining twenty-acre winter wheatfield owned by the Ramsdale twins, or the Chemical Brothers as I have already mentally dubbed them.
We can’t be surprised at the outcome.
At the end of January I tot up the visitors to my bird table. The square foot of board has attracted more avian species than the entire twenty-five acres of arable land surrounding it. Hardly scientific, but horribly illustrative.
The table has seen goldfinch, greater spotted woodpecker, house sparrow, wood pigeon, rook, jackdaw, chaffinch, hedge sparrow, blackbird, robin, song thrush, tree sparrow, blue tit, great tit, coal tit, redwing. (The hoppers have attracted pheasant). There is volume as well as variety on this Piccadilly Circus of bird tables, particularly now that I have draped it with more seed feeders and suet holders.
The bird species in the Chemical Brothers’ field and Flinders total, in one month, wood pigeon, pheasant, hedge sparrow, rook.
With this in mind, you can really appreciate the irony of a display commonly found in supermarkets during the spring and summer months. The gardening shelf is stocked with compost bags, garden tools, wooden bird feeders and many bags of bird seed and fat balls. And right next to them is row upon row of sprays and chemical washes designed to kill off large proportions of garden life.
Some cautions that you can read on the back labels of such sprays include the following: Wash hands and exposed skin after use. Dangerous to bees. Do not contaminate water with product or its container. Do not re-use this container for any purpose. But there’s one warning that really stands out, if only as a humiliating endorsement of the sheer stupidity of the human race. These sprays, designed for the plants in your garden, carry the warning: avoid release to the environment.
Oh-kaaay.
The environment is not just the Amazonian rainforest or the polar ice-caps. Along with the wide environment that is our planet, everyone has their own, local environment. This is the area in which you live your day-to-day life. If you have a garden, that’s part of your environment. Avoid release to the environment is equivalent to saying, don’t spray this in your garden.
Irish wildlife is struggling to survive. Bird, fish and small mammal populations are in decline, some precipitously. Climate change, along with air and water pollution resulting from industry and agriculture are major factors in this loss of wildlife, so an individual could well argue that spraying a wee bit of poison in their garden now and then hardly counts.
The trouble is, we’re all spraying our own little square of the environment, and that adds up to a heck of a lot of poison that finds its way into the air, the soil and the water.
Students in the aptly named village of Streamstown in Westmeath won a gold award for a project that examined the impact of chemical pesticides, and researched alternatives with a view to protecting our natural waters. Apparently the Streamstown Tidy Village group were eager participants in the project as they were keen to get away from relying on chemical sprays.
They’re not alone in that. More and more people are looking for ways to minimise their exposure to strong chemicals, and the good news is that safe alternatives are available and sometimes you need look no further than your fridge. According to Diarmuid Gavin, mixing one part cow’s milk to two parts water makes an effective spray for blackspot.
Another way to nourish your plants and help them to fight disease is from the ground up. Beneficial bacteria are present in vast quantities in healthy soil and they perform a range of invaluable (and largely thankless) tasks, one of which is to inhibit the spread of plant disease and soil-borne pathogens.
Savvy golf groundskeepers and municipal park managers are using EM (Effective Microorganisms) to green up their grounds. The grass and plants can find and extract the elements they need from the soil, which helps with growth and disease resistance. And their soil is aerated and ‘crumbly’.
Needless to say, soil which can absorb greater volumes of water is highly desirable in a country prone to flooding. Even some GAA clubs are getting into the soil game.
Waging chemical warfare on a garden is a fool’s game, especially when there are so many viable alternatives. But if you will insist on buying chemical sprays, then don’t waste your money on bird-boxes because birds, like any sensible creatures, want nothing to do with a toxic environment.
Why not aim for a genuinely green garden instead?