Life in Ghibli

April 01, 2025

Spattered sun through the trees, a ruined old house and moss carpet

We are truly into Spring now, and life feels deeply like something you’d watch in a Ghibli film, or admire in beautiful Beatrix Potter illustrations. We have been so fortunate to have a lengthy spell of sun recently, giving a lot of our seedlings an excellent head start. Many of our days have been filled with reading in the sun, laughing at the ducks, and getting our hands covered in soil. It is a pleasure to do the dishes outside at the tap when the sun is pouring down on you, and the chickens run over to eat any scraps that didn’t make it to the composter.

Yesterday, our ducks free ranged a little too freely. I ended up on a two and a half hour walk to find them, and despite my lack of success, I found countless other wonders instead: a frog, many ladybirds, more wildflowers than I can name, and to my delight, an absolute treasure trove of wild garlic.

There are a lot of things that I am not good at, but I am excellent at finding frogs when I go looking, or perhaps they just feel more comfortable presenting themselves to me than others. While on a large walk to collect Damsons after first moving here, DB and I found so many frogs that we pondered the idea of creating a little terrarium for some of them. We ultimately decided against this for a number of reasons, including the 200ft of space inside, energy cost, and finally that really they should exist in nature, and if we do our jobs correctly as stewards of the land and cultivators of nature, we will be able to see plenty of frogs without having to keep them in a tank.

The ladybirds (Coccinellidae) were a wonderful sighting too, an indicator that everyone is waking up for spring. Ladybirds are excellent natural pest control, and also pollinate, so we do what we can to encourage them onto our land. Beyond this, I just find them beautiful, and find they bring me back to childhood, gently trying to scoop them up on leaves and walking with great care and caution to show a friend or a supervising adult.

Now, the wild garlic. We have been trying (somewhat unsuccessfully) to grow wild garlic from seed on and off for six months. A number of issues have prevented this from happening but the main culprit is probably my ignorance, and as a result we have been looking for some wild garlic we can legally transplant. A day last year towards the end of spring, we were walking down the lane and swore we could smell it, but it was in another farmer’s woodland. It seems as though a lot of it has propagated into part of our land that we only recently cleared, so you can imagine the surprise and delight. Wild garlic dip, wild garlic pesto, wild garlic on toast and wild garlic raw just for the hell of it. We feel abundant and hope that it will continue to thrive in coming years.

So really walking miles and miles through our fields and along all the borders to find (or rather not find) the ducks was bountiful in other ways. Exhausted, I decide that if a fox has eaten the ducks at 11:00 in the morning on a sunny day, they aren’t coming back anyway, and if they are alive, they’ll come back on their own. I go into the hut and start to grind coffee beans. I hear a quack. I have been hearing quacks all morning but when I go to look, Geoffrey is not there. I continue grinding beans, telling myself I must wait 30 minutes before going to check again. I hear a quack. I bloom my coffee and think about putting music on. I hear a quack and run outside - just in case. Sure enough there are our cheeky little ducks, dunking their heads in a bucket of water, delighted. It’s hard to be annoyed when your ducks are alive, and when you found a blanket of wild garlic, a frog, and some ladybirds.

I have since made a makeshift pull across fence, which blocks off the entrance to the lane to prevent the ducks and chickens from going too far. Other quality of life updates include planting herbs in and around the bird pen, and dotting some big buckets of water around the garden for the ducks to dunk in at their will. Despite having now two (2) ponds, I often hear a loud splash, and look out to see Geoffrey squeezed into one of the buckets of water. He is a weird, but very sweet boy.

As mentioned in the wild garlic section, we uncovered a small part of our land which had been previously covered in mostly dead brambles and ivy. There is a clear circle in part of it, and the cats run in and out, along with it being guarded by a large hawthorn tree, home to a number of different bird species, we had nicknamed it the Fairy Ring. We knew there was a wall here, but the most recent storm tore away some of the foliage and we realised that instead of a wall, there was an entire building. Last week I decided I needed in! So we borrowed a pair of rusty old shears, and using those and secateurs we snipped our way in. After an hour and a lot of cuts and scratches, it was clear that this place was a house, likely hundreds of years old based on the chimney, stones and disrepair, but more recently had been filled in with breezeblocks, likely to act as a holding for animals.

Other than continuing to support the wild garlic here, we have no plans for this area yet. It seems to be home to a lot of wildlife, and it often feels these days as though the biggest detriment to wildlife is humans. Due to the partial shade and spattered sun, it might be the perfect place to cultivate moss, or sow some wildflowers, but it seemed to be doing quite well prior to our intervention, so perhaps our lack of interference is the best choice.

(aj)