What Wild Animal Is Digging In My Parsley

Astrophysicists probably get asked exciting questions about the possible curvature of the universe. People bail me upward at parties to need, "What'south eating my parsley?".

Possums can survive on wintertime gum leaves. They just mostly don't want to.

The answer to "What's eating my olive tree …" depends on your local fauna: if you have a cow, information technology'southward a moo-cow. A alive–in caprine animal means the goat is the likely culprit. At our place it is almost certainly swamp wallabies though, if your x–twelvemonth old has just learned to use the secateurs, in that location may be some other possibility.

The guilty rose eater is more than difficult. If it's a nibble in a bud information technology may be from earwigs, slugs or snails. If half the bush has been munched and the other half torn downwards to footing level, it'southward a wallaby. But, usually, it's possums.

Possums like rose buds. Non as much as they beloved the juvenile leaves of bluish gums, juvenile loquat leaves or the long late winter sprays of loquat flowers. Simply possums are also gourmets. They'll happily exist on a 90 per cent native diet, then mooch over to your roses for some variation.

Winter parsley is especially tempting for possums. Despite having the best and softest fur coats in the commune, winter is chilly if you are a possum. Even if you lot accept found a nice, dry, heated roof space to sleep in during the day, you tin can't send out for pizza for breakfast. Or maybe they do, and no pizza delivery person has noticed the mitt that takes the box and hands out the payment is a chip small and furry.

There is not much nutrition in a wintertime gum leaf, just when more carbohydrates are needed. Really there is never much nutrition in a glue leaf, except for those very few animals who have evolved to survive on them, like koalas, who spend the time they are not eating gum leaves doing very little at all.

Possums can survive on winter gum leaves. They just mostly don't want to, particularly when they are given a option.

And a lovely choice it is, too. Gardeners have been preparing the winter feast for the resident possums all summertime long: lines of Brussels sprouts, cabbages, wintertime lettuce and parsley, long and green and luscious.

If the possums are into your parsley, you accept two choices. You can either pat yourself on the back as a patron of native animals and recollect how glad you are that a wild animal has accepted your hospitality. Or you tin can fence the possums out.

I don't necessarily mean 'contend' literally. Possums can climb fifty-fifty very tall fences. You lot don't become to be a gum leaf gourmet without extremely good claws for climbing tall copse and fences. Whatsoever contend that volition keep out a possum either has to accept a roof or an outward gradient at the top, so that as the possum climbs upwardly information technology finds itself hanging upside downward before information technology can clamber over the edge. Some athletic possums exercise manage to do this. Most don't.

The easiest way to deter parsley pinching possums is to use what used to exist called a milk crate, from the days when almost everyone stole crates from the local milk delivery van. Milk crates are now called 'storage boxes' and are hopefully bought legally – plastic cubes that volition let in calorie-free but keep out possums, equally long as you hammer in a few posts then they can't push or kick or bash furiously with their paws to shift them.

You tin likewise make pocket-size plastic or drinking glass possum proof greenhouses, once again attached firmly if temporarily to the ground. These have the reward of making your parsley abound faster, bigger, sooner and demand less water, and you tin can besides move them as needed to abound early tomatoes in them, or capsicum or zucchini or other cold susceptible plants.

The possums will non be impressed if you debate off your/their parsley, of grade. And they'll know y'all are the culprit. Possums are not fools. I've known possums scramble up to stand on the windowsill, yelling what are probably obscene insults at the gardeners who blocked off their artery to the corn patch. Or I assume they were obscene. I don't speak possum. Your possums may besides may dance with deliberate provocation on your bedroom roof at two am or tear upwards an unprotected bit of your garden, just for revenge.

Merely – hopefully – your garden will be big and varied enough to recover from a possum rampage- they have a brusque attention span so one night's impairment is probably all you'll get- and your parsley, at least, will be prophylactic. And delicious.

As every possum knows, parsley is sweeter and more tender in winter. Possums are non fools.

This week I am:

• Watching the camellias blossom in shades of pinks and reds and white – the white always looks a bit grubby equally it seems to accept more nectar than the other varieties, and so has the tiny claw marks of birds' feet over every petal;
• Eating parsley, and more than parsley, chopped into soups and stews and eaten equally a salad, finely chopped with hunks of apple and walnut, lemon juice and olive oil;
• Still non getting around to asking Bryan to dig upwards the Jerusalem artichokes;
• Watching the Eastern spine bills in the pineapple and fruit salad and blue salvias – the blue salvia needs to be cut back every bit it grows into a jungle every summer – but I tin't bear to when it is still feeding the nectar eaters;
• Rediscovering hot pancakes with cold lemon or lime juice from fruit fresh picked from the garden and a dust of caster saccharide; and
• Watching the wombats chew the long strands of kikuyu grass like spaghetti. Kikuyu grass never becomes major problem here because we are likewise cold for it to spread till mid–summertime, and in mid summer information technology's usually also dry for the kikuyato really get going. Then, just when it begins to feel comfortable, along comes the frost and the wombats.

Source: https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/6030373/parsley-pinching-possums/

Posted by: vazquezbence1954.blogspot.com

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