King Harbill and the Knights of the Raised Bed

Thanks for your suggestions regarding what we should do about our miscreant cat. We have come to the conclusion that the best way to tackle this problem is with crime prevention. This also applies to the dastardly deeds of various other garden criminals working alongside Muffin the Murderer to slowly destroy our beautiful garden.

We have therefore spent the last week recruiting our team of special garden agents and are proud to introduce:

Sergent Toad - Slug Division 
 The slugs stand no chance against his bionic tongue and if Muffin decides she wants toads legs for supper, his poisonous skin will give her a nasty shock. Toad sleeps in the wild flower section and patrols the veg bed at night.





WPC Ladybird Larvae - Aphid Prevention Squad
 With her insatiable appetite, no aphids will ever get away and if they do, her parents Lord and Ladybird will soon dispatch of them. She is most at home on the broad bean plants and amongst the roses.

Detective Inspector Max
Retired cop Max guards the borders of the garden and one well aimed bark is all it takes to send Muffin cowering back into the house and once again, peace is restored in Harbill's Garden.

NEWSFLASH: Crime Pumpkinelle

Over the last few days, we have noticed that a couple of our favourite plants are either dying or are dead.

Remember the beautiful harlequin squash in the last entry? Well here it is

Murder

Other casualties include one of our Atlantic Pumpkins whose stem has been broken

GBH

And everyday, the plot thickens when our foxglove looses some of its flowers

Theft

Photographic evidence from the crime scene

We have conducted several interviews with our garden fox, a gang of slugs and family of pigeons. We think we have, however, identified our prime suspect, who also has a very long record of previous convictions.

FEATURE: Our Blogsciples

We have been checking our statistics and are very excited to announce that our blog seems to have gone global... We have viewers from the US, Singapore, Croatia, India and even Mexico! Although it may just be one of our friends travelling for work and not having much else to do in their hotel room in the evening. We also couldn't help but notice that our viewing figures seem to be diminishing day by day, surely our garden isn't boring you?! Therefore this blog is devoted to our Followers (Blogsciples).

Firstly, thanks to Barbara for her correct identification of the Oxeye daisy - it has now come out:

Here's another one we are a bit baffled by. This was planted as a bulb and sprouted earlier than the Crocuses and has now formed this head which looks like it is about to flower but we still have no idea what it is (we threw the packet away without looking at it). Can you help?

And we would also like to feature a lovely garden from one of our loyal Blogsciples, Martin. Who says you have to have a garden to have a garden? We would like to think that this blog was his inspiration, perhaps Martin may like to start his own gardening blog?

In an attempt to get more comments, we present the picture below. Some of you may recognise the protagonist who is currently rather obsessed with his new hedge trimmer. Any caption ideas welcome.. prize will be (don't get too excited)..: the picture plus best caption featured as our 'Picture of the Week'.