Author Topic: Incredible walking peas!  (Read 1577 times)

squeezyjohn

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Incredible walking peas!
« on: April 24, 2014, 09:21:56 »
I'd been busy on the allotment with several jobs in the last few weeks - one involved planting out 4 nice new blueberry plants in some acidified soil and collecting loads of pine-needles to give them a nice deep mulch.  It also included sowing a second row of peas for successive cropping.

I'd been wondering why the peas were taking so long to come up even though it's been wet and warm ... and then I noticed lots of green growth coming from under the blueberry bushes ... all my peas were coming up at the opposite end of the plot from where I'd planted them!!!

Who's the culprit?  Mice? ... I thought they'd just eat them there and then rather than attempt to change my allotment plan for the year!

pigeonseed

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Re: Incredible walking peas!
« Reply #1 on: April 24, 2014, 09:33:38 »
Wow!  You'd think mice would have just eaten them, rather than storing them. Do you get squirrels?
Anyway, if they're still coming up, they can't have been too badly damaged. Are you going to move them back?

Digeroo

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Re: Incredible walking peas!
« Reply #2 on: April 24, 2014, 11:12:06 »
I have voles on site and they move things about.  I have peas ripening for seed saving and suddenly all the peas disappeared.  I did not think that the voles could possibly eat that many.

Then as a harvested my celery I started finding collections of peas in the cardboard collars round the stems.     Fortuneately the seeds of the three varieties I had sown looked different so I could sort them out.

antipodes

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Re: Incredible walking peas!
« Reply #3 on: April 24, 2014, 11:19:49 »
Yes, I have voles too. I realised that something was eating the swiss chard. When I lifted some nearby cardboard that was used as coverage, I saw that a little 'larder' was under there! Including bits of chard that had obviously been pulled off the plant!  It's the resident vole obviously, from the presence of tunnels. SO yes they do move things around to eat later! But generally voles get a lot of their food from the compost piles as they hate being exposed in the open, so they don't really steal much. Their tunnels tend to be destructive though. and if they stumble on a spud in the ground they will eat it through!
2012 - Snow in February, non-stop rain till July. Blight and rot are rife. Thieving voles cause strife. But first runner beans and lots of greens. Follow an English allotment in urban France: http://roos-and-camembert.blogspot.com

 

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