Mice and Strawberries

These are my strawberries!

They have been left in neat piles all around my allotment, between the rows of potatoes and broccoli, near the marrow plants, in fact just about anywhere within a reasonable mouse travelling distance of the strawberry plants.

At least I assume that the guilty party is a mouse or a family of mice - probably breeding happily in my nice warm compost heap. But why are they hoarding these strawberries in piles all around the place? What bit of the strawberry are they eating in particular? Why so many? Why are they hoarding? Why do they pick mostly unripe fruit? Or do they eat the ripe ones whole and think the others will ripen in storage?! A bit like the supermarket fruit?!




Please can any one throw any light on
this phenomenon?











And is there any way I can protect my fruit without resorting to killing the mice, which I just cannot do? Perhaps next year I shall strew holly twigs between the rows of fruit. I have successfully used that technique to protect seedlings in my greenhouse in the spring.

The snow has at last gone (although there are piles of very dirty snow remaining where it was piled up at the sides of roads and in carparks) and today I ventured out to make a start on tidying up the garden. It was mild for a while, then the temperature suddenly dropped and I came in for a hot chocolate!

Very soon nature came out to play! From my window seat I saw a squirrel, a green woodpecker, a pair of bluetits, a pair of blackbirds, a wood pigeon (Urgh), and a pair of robins. The robins have learnt to feed from the feeder strung up on the tree, the woodpecker loves the ant nests in the lawn, the bluetits are investigating the nesting box that is used by them every year, and the squirrel was bouncing all over the place probably looking for buried nuts as well as trying to work out how to get to the bird feeder!? All this is reward for my garden being totally organic - never do I use chemicals of any sort. All vegetable matter is composted - I have 5 bins in rotation- and when this is spread around the plants the birds go mad for all the worms, bugs and creepie crawlies in it.

The picture is what it was like a fortnight ago!

Roll on spring and summer!