Ana: What is that?!?
Viola: yeah, the name does sound strange, doesn't it? We think it's cute too, as are the bandicoots themselves, even if we do swear at them when they discover our vegetable gardens! Fortunately they don't come inside!
One of my late cousins actually played in a Celtic/Australian dance and folk band named 'The Bandicoots'. He liked the pun.
I can't do links, but if you look bandicoots up on the internet you should find a picture. And the Australian gardener's slang term 'to bandicoot' (that is, to harvest new potatoes or similar vegetables by digging lightly around the edges of the patch before a root crop has grown to full size) obviously comes from the habits of the animal.
Sc0ut: Sometimes gardening around wildlife can be a challenge. In the case of animals like the bandicoots, or the madder hawkmoth larvae that eat my madder and cleavers, I leave them to it and just plant extra, because the creatures are rarer than the crop. Sometimes I will net or fence off the extra plants, so there will be some left for me, and I always net my coffee plants so the hawkmoths don't lay eggs on those too, because coffee is in the same plant family and those caterpillars will eat anything in the Rubiaceae, and coffee is rarer and less easy to grow.
I share my garden with a lot of wildlife, and most of it is welcome as pollinators, pest controllers, because they are beautiful and fun to watch, because they are part of the natural environment or simply because many of them have nowhere else to go. We are fortunate in that we live on the outskirts of a small town in the middle of farmland and forest, but it is still a challenge for many of the animals, especially now that the bushland over the road is being torn up for building houses.
It's always a balancing act between getting what I want and need out of the garden and providing a safe space for the creatures. I can't turn the garden over to them entirely, because what I grow feeds myself and my household as well as several other people, and a chunk of my income derives from the garden, and I need to keep paying my mortgage. One of my sisters lives in East Gippsland, way out in the bush, and apart from half an acre where she grows food, all the rest of her land, and there's a lot of it, is designed and planted as a refuge for the local birds. But my place is tiny, only a third of an acre. So I have to plan carefully and plant densely. I try to set up 'groves', with each tree surrounded by other smaller useful plants as it would be in nature. My tomatoes and climbing beans have herbs planted around their roots, many of my fruit trees have an understorey of violets, nasturtiums, raspberries, evening primrose, or such legumes as broad beans or peas which will feed the tree roots as they grow, because I can't afford to buy much in the way of fertilisers, and I don't like the feel of what artificial fertilisers do to the
Edit: this just did something weird, and posted before I was ready. Sorry!
So, to continue: I don't like the feel of what artificial fertilisers do to the soil or the microbiota, so I use compost, aged manure, and plant a lot of legumes for the nitrogen. My soil is cruddy to start with, mostly sand and rocks. So I mulch heavily, which slowly builds the soil as the mulch is absorbed, and also protects the soil somewhat from our really extreme climate.
Lots of insects and other small creatures live in the mulch, which attracts lizards and other small predators, which then eat a lot of garden pests. The tiny lizards such as skinks and geckos eat mosquitoes, flies, moths and such, the big lizards eat slugs,snails (and the occasional small lizard, mouse or bird) and if they also take a toll of my strawberries and muntries they more than make up for that in snail control.
For years a big old female brown snake lived in the garden, but she was washed out of her den and drowned in the floods last winter, and since then several young male browns have tried to move in, so far unsuccessfully. She was fine with me, but some of the youngsters are aggressive. So I have to be a bit careful around them until they settle down. There are also a couple of Jacky lizards who are big, but very shy of me. And goannas who will take eggs, chickens and ducklings if they can get into the fowlyard, as will the magpies, ravens, crows and kookaburras, not to mention quolls and foxes, so my fowlyard has a chicken-wire roof as well as heavy wire around the base of the sides.
The birds, on the other hand, are downright cheeky. The little ones, wrens, pardalotes, honeyeaters, grey shrike-thrush and the like, are good for insect control, and the big ones, various parrots mostly - galahs, corellas, sulphur-crests and such - want the fruit, so I net my trees. In a desperate year, like after the 2015 bushfires, the big parrots will actually tear the nets off the trees to get at the fruit, but that's unusual. I generally leave a few trees unnetted so they have some fruit.
I plant a lot of flowers, both because flowers are something I sell, and to attract pollinators. At present my front yard is full of butterflies, bees both European and native, flower wasps and multitudes of beetles because the scabiosa, roses, native clematis and many of the roses are in bloom, also the lavender. The Vitex flowers are just opening, which draw native bees and flower wasps from miles around, which then go on to pollinate my tomatoes. While most flower wasps are nectar feeders, they kill a lot of pest caterpillars to feed to their babies, who need meat. The lacewings eat aphids. Mantids eat everything.
We have feral rabbits and guinea pigs, and if I snare those they go in the pot, because they are a pest, and also good to eat. The cats also kill them sometimes. A small mob of wallabies drop in regularly to eat the chicory and lettuce, and in hot dry weather to eat the succulents, and for them I just plant extra, because they belong here. We have possums, both ringtail and brushtail, which live in the roof of the fuel shed. I put up possum boxes for them, but they ignore them, and various small birds have moved into the boxes. At least the microbats consent to live in the bat boxes I put up, since natural tree hollows are in short supply, and they eat a lot of insects too.
As I said, it's a complex dance, keeping all of us housed and fed, but I'm the human with title to the land (although I suspect the land owns me rather than the other way around), so I guess it's my responsibility.
