Ivy

Spent a good chunk of the middle of today taming the ivy infestation left over after my original cull of a couple of weeks ago. The aim is to try and limit the ingress of woodlice into the cottage: the little buggers are so adept at finding their way into the tightest openings into a building, it's frankly admirable, but nevertheless bloody annoying, especially as there's a quarter of an acre of garden with plenty of deliberately-left rotting wood piles [for the hedgehogs etc., during autumn and winter; and the rest of the wee things that need such habitat, generally], let alone the thousands of acres of National Park just over the garden wall. No, they instead choose to try and colonise the one part of our house that we really don't need them to: the guest accommodation.

Hence the ivy clearance from the roofline: they seem to use it as a kind of highway into the roof, under the slates, and into the roof-space and thence into the cottage itself. I know they're harmless, and normally I don't give them a second thought, wherever they are; except where our guests stay, of course. If you invite someone into your home, you don't want them to have to share their chunk of the space with a colony of isopods, however inoffensive. They can happily come into our part of the house, but that end is for invited guests only, not interloping species from outside. Anyhow, the completed deforestation of our roofline will hopefully go some considerable way to mitigating the situation and minimise the number of the little critters that get past the front door of the place. Keep you posted...