Not sure what to do here if I’m honest.

Yesterday (26th March), we finally made it up to the allotment to tackle a few more tidy up jobs. The plan was to finish weeding an area where I’d piled up compost from one of the wooden bins, and spread it over the bay for the beetroot and parsnips. Another job was to work on emptying wooden compost bin 1 then turning bin 2 into the empty-ish bin 1.

Then we were going to start turning the 3 dalek type compost bins into the wooden bin 2 – all clear? Good!

Only, it didn’t go to plan.

See the weedy patch against the fence? Well that did get tidied and the compost underneath it did get spread out.

These are the wooden compost bins and daleks which we made a good start on emptying…..until we got to the dalek on the right which has it’s own lid. We were doing well and getting down to the last third of it when we found this:

BABY RATS!!

The 3 in the pictures are the ones which stayed out of the nest, the others went back in! I know some of you will be thinking I should have ‘disposed’ of them but I didn’t have the heart – their eyes were still closed. If I tell the committee they will be in with their poisons and I don’t want that either.

I have heard that rats hate coffee grounds so I’m going to spend the next couple of days gathering some up to take with me next time and put in the bins. I read online last night that the mother might move the family herself since their nest has been disturbed – that is my preferred option!

So that is the wildlife situation on the plot at the moment and I am a little anxious about it to be honest.

However, in other plot news:

I’ll leave you with this picture I took just as we were leaving the allotment. If you have any rat ideas, please let me know in the comments.