BANKS PENINSULA

- When some garden helpers are more form than function.

If you love animals, you are likely to find ways to include them in your life. When I first moved here, I brought with me an older rescue dog. She was nervous and had a problem with men. She’s relaxed now – a bit too relaxed sometimes, but she will still bark at visitors or indeed anyone who dares to drive past.

So her job is security.

I got another dog. He is a huntaway, but he’s really scared of cattle, having been chased by 15 of them after he squealed when he got zapped by the electric fence.

So he and the other one have been put on pest control duties. They are reasonably good at this. Sheba catches possums, while Jimbob barks loudly. They also chase rabbits that hide in a wood pile near my garden. I’m grateful to them for this. So far I haven’t had any problems with bunnies eating my crops.

Chickens have obvious advantages. They give us eggs. I use the shells in the vege garden to attempt to deter slugs and add calcium to the soil. I also put them to work in the tunnelhouse when there are no tomatoes growing in there. They scratch up the soil, mixing in greenery and fertilising as they go. They eat slugs and grass grubs. I have even been known to put a carcass in the compost.

I like the idea of chook tractors and tried to get one going, but it didn’t work for me. The idea is that you have a mobile chookhouse with an outside area and you let the chooks scratch up the soil and get rid of weeds, then move it on when they have finished.

A simpler thing to do is to throw all matter of vege and garden waste into the enclosure and they will turn it into compost at their leisure. This can just be dug out and used with the litter from inside the coop.

I bought a couple of Muscovy ducks with the intention that they would get rid of the slugs. I soon found out they would only eat slugs if I found them first. We also have a couple of drakes of a different breed which means that when they mate with the Muscovy ducks, there are ducklings that are infertile. This is handy because I love ducklings but we don’t need lots of ducks. The ducks’ job is to help the sheep keep the grass down in the orchard and to clean up the windfall pears.

We also have five fat Wiltshire ewes. They are brilliant.

They are no trouble and never try to escape, maybe because they have a pretty good life. They keep the grass down in the orchard and fertilise the grass. The trees in this orchard are mostly mature and aren’t bothered by the sheep.

Our other new orchard needs to be mown regularly, but I’ve been reading about a rare breed called Shropshire that are known as orchard sheep as they tend not to eat trees. That would be so much better than mowing. But they do need shearing.

Wiltshires don’t need shearing as they shed their wool naturally, making them look, at times, like they’ve been living in some wild place without a thought for their personal appearance and at other times like they have been shorn by the most skilful shearer in the world.

I was given some daggy wool to use as mulch around the trees I’ve been planting up the hill. It’s wonderful stuff, so if we have did sheep that needed to be shorn, that would be a good advantage.

We also have five alpacas. Their best quality is that they tend to poo in the same spot, so it is easy to collect for use in the garden. It is great to have your own source of manure and these boys give us a surprising amount. They are also good at grazing places where we don’t want the cattle to go.

The cattle are not ours. A neighbour grazes them here, which works well for us. I do occasionally pick up some cow pats and put them in the compost. Also, it’s just nice having them round, even if Jimbob doesn’t agree.

We are looking into getting some guinea pigs. They could eat the grass around the berries, which is hard to keep on top of. But they would need to be protected from the kāhu (swamp harrier) which would pick them off like lollies in a scramble.

I would love a couple of donkeys. Such sweet animals and I’ve heard they eat thistles. Another problem solved. If only I could find something that would get rid of the twitch, convolvulus and dock, I’d be sorted!

Nature has its own integrated system, where everything has its place, a perfectly balanced cycle that includes soil, plants, trees, birds and animals.

I think we sometimes forget how important animals are to our survival.

On our wee farm, all our animals have some kind of use, although with some of them, I have to think quite hard to figure out what that use is.