greedy cow

You are currently browsing articles tagged greedy cow.

Holy Cow

May 29, 2010 in Team News by fullmonte | 4 comments

Holy Cow!  And not in a “comic strip exclamation” way… no, no in a “revered by the Indians, sacred animals” kinda way… Really, honestly, there comes a point where you just have to give up and say: “Ok, guys – you beasts are amazing!”

So – there we were, painting the building  (thankfully, we’d just got down from the scaffolding because if we’d have been up it then: a) we might have fallen off as our jaw dropped to the floor and toppled us over and b) we might not have been able to rush to the defence of our garden in time…) when Steve just gaped and pointed.  I followed his gaze and saw 2 bovine characters munching away at the grass just inches in front of the raised beds!

What?  How?  Holy Cow?! (OK, that was in an exaggerated, comic strip stylie!!!).  They were not wearing bells so we hadn’t heard them coming and I swear we both glanced around for their parachute or the airship that had dropped them off…

Steve rushed off down the garden to confront the buggers and I followed, waving my arms protectively over my plants.  There was a moment when Steve realised that he was nearly eyeball to eyeball with 2 very big beasts and, well, they looked like they could really hurt an inexperienced English dude…  But he ‘manned up’ and in a deep, gruff voice starting shouting at them in Serbian and herding them off down to the lower terrace.  They reluctantly lumbered off with a sideways glance to the garden and the lush green goodies they’d just been cheated of, tripping over guy ropes as they went!  (No harm done Nik, honest!!!).

They found their way up beside the workshop and just as I was struggling to move the makeshift pallett barrier that we had in place, they simply stepped up the retaining wall of the compost chamber area.  This step up has got to be 3-4 feet high and is tough for even a long-legged chap like Steve to manage.  It posed no problem for these guys at all!  Gulp!

We shooed them out of the main gate and then, knees knocking, looked at each other in awe and wonder…

OK time to put on our Cow Detective gear again and figure out where the bugger’s had entered.  Virtual deerstalkers on and imaginary spyglass in hand we set off down to the lower terrace.  The really serious pallett fence, reinforced with barbed wire, etc, etc was… intact!  Phew!  So they didn’t get in there then…

Nope – trampled grass and a flattened hedge in one corner, behind Danny’s tent led us to the Cow Highway.  It was almost impassable for us – narrow paths, overgrown with spiky bushes and brambles, stony & uneven underfoot.  But it was littered with cow pats. The path had 2 clear cow routes – 1 branched off to the left down to the stream and the other led onto Jovo’s land immediately below ours.  This was BAD news because it meant that even if we blocked the entrance onto our land from Jovo’s, the cows could still wander along the stream and gain entry at some place further up.

We had to leave the camp and this meant dealing with the cow problem – neither of us could bear the sick feeling in our stomach when we even considered leaving the site unprotected…  Unfortunately as we began our now 3rd attempt at cow proofing (3rd time lucky?) the heavens opened.  Even with our full motorcycle rainproof suits on (all that remains of our beloved biking days) we got soaked to the skin as we carried all the bits of metal we could find down to the streamside.  Steve did a sterling job slashing trees to lay a hedge and piling up logs and obstacles.  By now we were way beyond underestimating the sacred beasts and really went overboard with the cow barrier.

In the bucketing rain Steve walked along the stream and looked for routes up where they could step over the terrace walls (now we knew what heights they could climb!) and onto the land and attempted to block their entry at every point.

(If you’re wondering about the electric fence by now and thinking: ‘come on guys – sod the expense, just put the damn thing up!’ then we have to confess there’s a flaw in this plan… Electric fences need to be clear of undergrowth or else they’ll short out as boughs fall on them etc, so really we would have to erect the fence well inside out boundary, clear of all the stooping branches.  Sadly this would make it a hazard for our guests so we are resigned to using the fence on the palm fence boundary only to deter any human intruders).

There is a moral to this story: when 3 years ago the elderly villager pointed down to what seemed inpenetrable undergrowth and the stream and indicated that cows would come onto our land that way, we should have believed him!

Maybe now that we are giving the cows the respect they deserve, with a cow defence that’s truly worthy of them and have ceased all jokes about bbq-ing them, they’ll leave us alone…

Tags: , ,

Cow Proof

May 18, 2010 in Den, The Build by fullmonte | 1 comment

It was a lovely sunny day and I was tending the garden when I heard a cow bell that sounded too close for comfort…  Dressed in just a baggy t-shirt and knickers I wandered down to the lower terrace where the sound was coming from.  As I approached the opening to the land below our land, across which we had erected a 3-stringed barbed wire fence, I was confronted with the sight of a large cow being driven by Jovo.  Jovo owns the land beyond our boundary and is the strange character from whom we bought part of our plot.

As my mind whirred to try & find the right words in local language to say “Er, please don’t let your cow come any closer…” I was rendered speechless as I watched the great beast push its way through the barbed wire barrier, snapping one of the strands in the process!  Once on the land it headed fast towards where it knew green things lurked in earthy beds… Jovo pushed his way through after his cow and ran after it as I came to my senses and shouted “Moja bašta!” (My garden!).  He managed to steer the cow back but it lumbered off out of control and ended up wandering around the other side of the workshop.  In the end he moved pallets and bricks to let the creature through and he drove it through the main gate which I opened for him and then locked behind them, wishing I knew the Serbian for “Get orf my land!”.

At the time I was hopping mad as I thought Jovo had been deliberately herding his cow through our land.  I’m still not entirely sure but have since looked up the word ‘Nazad’ that I heard Jovo shout at the cow and it means ‘back’ not ‘forward’ as I first thought!  So maybe he was trying to control his cow but failing or maybe he caught sight of me and decided to act as if the invasion wasn’t deliberate…  Who knows, but what we do know is:

  • the barbed wire fence that we thought was so impenetrable… wasn’t at all
  • this is definitely a route the cow had taken before – it was a creature on a mission & seemed to know exactly where it was going
  • cows can navigate seemingly impossibly difficult terrain – the cow hoof marks are in the carpet laid out beside the workshop.  This area was strewn with twisted bits of metal and is very difficult to traverse, a narrow strip of land with a sheer drop beside it… and it posed no problem at all for the bovine bugger!

Despite the distress (and the embarrassment of realising the whole time I’d been prancing around like a madwoman barely clothed!) I was actually so glad I was there to see with my own eyes what a cow can do and for Jovo to see how displeased I was.

So now we had proof of the cow, time to make the campsite cow-proof…

We spent the best part of a day erecting a pallet fence all the way along the edges of the campsite where we now know  the weak spots are.  The pallets have been nailed together with lumps of wood and barbed wire wound all the way through the structure.  We have piled up brambles and spiky bushes all the way and will continue to do so, hoping in time that the vegetation will grow up and provide even more of a barrier.

It remains to be seen if a sufficiently motivated cow could still force its way through this hardcore barrier….  We have done the best with the materials we have available right now.  Stage 2 is to get the electric fence up but that’s a big job and requires us to buy a load of wood to make hefty posts so we’ll be moving onto that as soon as we have the time & money.

This is a scheduled post as we are back on the campsite – probably bbq-ing beef!

Tags: ,

Life goes on…

April 23, 2010 in Nature, Organic Gardening by fullmonte | 2 comments

The cow came back.

I know, I know… we were supposed to have made the camp cow-proof by now, but Steve only managed to get the barbed wire barrier erected along & across the stream (dodging the hailstones), before the storm soaked him to the skin.  The hammering the weather gave him that day probably helped his man flu to develop.  This illness, plus days away in Dobrota helping a friend, meant we were away from the campsite for nearly a week and on our return the bovine bugger’s recent presence was immediately obvious (the cow only, mysteriously, visits when we are not there…).

The cabbages (they might have been brussel sprouts – they had never actually grown to their adult form… they were munched within an inch of their lives last summer but we left the stalks and they had started to re-grow) were the only victims:

If the munched stalks weren’t evidence enough, the 3 cow pats (on the grass in this picture…) left us in no doubt.  Thankfully, this time it didn’t trample the raised beds so the little cucumbers (in the photo above) escaped a crushing.

How now, <insert colour> cow? <insert rude word>!

Due to all the rain, the soft mud had preserved it’s hoof-marks well.  We followed these prints carefully, noting the direction of the hooves to determine which way the cow was ambling.  Flanking my Sherlock, I pointed out be-headed tufts of grass and we noted more droppings.  We paced the entire site, methodically and carefully, looking for clues; flattened undergrowth, trampled ground… We had been told that cows don’t climb steps – was this an old wive’s tale or fact???  We detected this may be true…

The stream defence (we are 99% sure) is cow-proof so we have eliminated one line of enquiry.  It seems the cow entered through a gap in the boundary at the lowest terrace.  The route from the land beyond onto this terrace is an overgrown slope but not impassable for a determined beast.  The route from the lower terrace to the next one up is a walk along the top of a stone wall.  It’s precarious for us, but apparently cows aren’t unphased by tiptoeing along the edge of the wall!  The route from there to the next terrace up is via a couple of steps… There were hoof-marks either side of these steps to suggest it avoided them but the climb wasn’t high enough to deter the cow.  The new terrace walls with their steps, were simply walked around and over by the cow and, interestingly, whereas last time the cow barged up the slope leading to the orchard/ flower garden area and gobbled the newly formed fruit on the pear tree, this time the simple steps cut into the mud bank had seemingly deterred the animal and the pear continues to blossom, unmolested:

And at every point where the way down was via a long set of steps and where all other routes down or up were too high a climb, we saw the hoof-marks turning round and going back the way they came….

We have erected a barbed wire barrier across the gap in the lowest terrace – too low to be got under and too high to get over – and have started to pile up against it all the prickly, thorny undergrowth we have cut down.  We hope that by the time all the strimming and clearing is done this Spring, all the cuttings are piled up against the boundary and the brambles start to grow up it, the boundary will appear to be naturally intact.

We await further visitations.  If it comes again we will be beyond baffled.

In the meantime, let’s celebrate the green life that continues to flourish.  The beans are running away (we noted that one leaf was munched from one plant but seemingly the cow prefers its greens older and stringier!):

The courgettes may have suffered from a little slug damage but they are mostly flourishing:

And the green shoots of the lovely legumes proves Steve (and John Lennon) was right: Give Peas A Chance

The herbs remain lush… here the parsley, mint & thyme is flourishing:

Above the flower garden, the passion flower – the sole survivor of all the cuttings we tended last year – has made it through the winter and is now growing new leaves and extending its tendrils up the palm fence:

And the sweet peas are leaning towards their supports in the flower garden, hopefully getting ready to stretch themselves up the trellis and begin their scented ascent.

Last autumn Steve put 3 walnuts in 3 pots and we mostly forgot about them, occasionally checking for signs of life.  Two of the seeds have sprouted and here’s a tiny nut tree:

However, in the third pot, the seed had been dug up and the nut-muncher left behind some hair:

Phew, it’s survival of the fittest here in our organic garden!

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

The day the garden died…

August 2, 2009 in Organic Gardening by fullmonte | No comments

The greedy cow came back.  It waited until we had left last Saturday morning.  All the pallet fence was in place and all the gates were locked so unless it had a key cut during the week (Mon says it was a Gary Larsson cow, so anything’s possible) we are not entirely sure how it got in.  Nik reckons it’s a Ninja Cow and it parachuted in.  The neighbours had always said the cows come up stream but with the size of the terraces and stream side to climb we didn’t believe them.  Guess they were right after all…

The brassicas, which had made a stunning recovery from the last ravaging, are now gone, gone, gone:

Brassicas - buried

The tomatoes have been properly totalled this time – trampled and most of the fruiting stems munched.  There are a few flowers left but I’m not holding my breath…

Tomatoes - trampled

And the peppers, which had just started to form beautiful fruits are no more…

An ex-pepper

I am beyond gutted.  The bugger also got to the pear tree that was an anniversary pressies from our friends – it’s still hanging on but all the pears are gone.  I’m trying to be very peaceful and philosophical about it all and see the point behind it all but often I fail.

Reasons to be cheerful (Part II):

  • better to have learnt that the raised beds have to be totally fenced off within the boundary now than next year when we would have put even more time, effort & money into them
  • working with the soil this year has proved it’s not as great as it should be and needs lots more improving over the autumn – the remains of the massacre has helped to boost the compost heap a little
  • we love green tomatoe chutney so all those fruits that develop too late to ripen red will be put to good use
  • we were getting sick of marrow anyway
  • the garden isn’t a priority and a bit of a distraction – the daily watering was taking too much time
  • at least the bastards didn’t get the aubergines…

Aubergines in a pot

So we have surrounded the raised beds with pallet constructions and barriers.  We will monitor the cow poo on the land very carefully and see where they are coming and going and be much better prepared for next season.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

« Older entries