Vermin

I'm not sure who got the bigger surprise when I walked into my kitchen after homework time this evening - me or the rat. I noticed it out of the corner of my eye nosing about on the shelf behind the gas rings. I looked at it, it looked at me and then scuttled behind the piece of board that blocks off the chimney. This weak link in my defenses against vermin has now been strengthened so I'm hoping we won't come across each other again in a hurry. I know that rats are a pretty much global problem and live very much closer to us than we would like to think. When you see a rat nosing around the place you prepare food it is, none the less, still unpleasant.

My minor encounter with a rat pails into insignificance compared to our friend Dee's experiences over the years living on the site of the small hospital that she and her husband Keith first started just over twenty years ago. I went up to see Dee on Sunday and she told me about the different kinds of wildlife she'd shared the house with at different times. She said that the rats were much easier to cope with than the bats, which used to roost on the joists that supported her roof. I'm not sure how I would have coped with a bat falling onto my dinner plate!

Duncan, our farm manager, has been hard at work today planting banana 'suckers' (offshoots from the banana trees). Our banana plantation now has a hundred and twenty trees planted in it. Many of them will be bearing fruit in about six weeks time so I'm hoping that we are at the start of what will be a successful enterprise. Properly managed our bananas, kale and tomatoes could help us to be pretty much self sufficient in those parts of the menu. As ever it was all hands on deck for the planting. It's not as simple as it sounds. First a large hole has to be dug (banana suckers are quite a size) then the suckers have to be placed and the hole filled in. Duncan had sixty-six suckers to plant today so the pupils in our two oldest primary classes pitched in to help him out from about three this afternoon. Duncan was very pleased with their work and I'm sure they will be very pleased when they start eating the fruits of their labours. Duncan is also anticipating an increase in demand for our surplus suckers which we sell for a hundred shillings each(a bit less than a pound and a bit more than a dollar). We'll have to be careful not to mix our customers up with the product if we decide to advertise the suckers for sale.