Sharing our garden with backyard friends
Along with the satisfaction of growing your own food and flowers, the pleasure of real freshness and flavour, the greatest joy of successful organic gardening is spying a rare butterfly, a grass snake or a dragonfly by your pool. All the natural fertility you make in your soil, the many forms of life it supports and the inviting and sustaining habitat you create will attract the wildlife we all love and wish to see. These are disappearing in the wild and our aim is to preserve and bring them to strength again within our bounds. We may lose some crops to them, but in return they give us pleasure, control many pests and improve our fertility.
Surely we can afford to share a little of our and nature's surplus with them? But not only may we have wild friends who live with us, we can have pets and livestock. These latter are a cunning way to convert medium-grade household and garden wastes into high-grade food and also high-grade compost material. By feeding animals leftovers and any other edible items that would otherwise go to waste, we can recycle the food value back as eggs, meat or milk.
This is also a way of converting the surpluses of summer into a more storable form. Don't be put off by the added responsibility of looking after animals – having chickens is much easier than keeping a cat or a dog – and their eggs are far better!
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