Feeding & Nutrition

The airing cupboard hums, and behind the stacked towels, a plastic tub of beetles is quietly multiplying. I didn't set out to farm insects. I set out to feed a hedgehog. The one that started appearing at dusk by the back fence, nose down, snuffling the same patch of lawn every night, looked thin, and the internet said mealworms, so I bought a small tub and thought that was the end of it.

It wasn't. Mealworms, left in warmth with a bit of bran and a slice of potato for moisture, don't just sit there. They pupate. They become beetles. The beetles lay eggs. The eggs become more mealworms, and within a month I had a colony where I'd meant to have a snack. The hedgehog, for his part, was delighted, but he is one small animal with one small appetite, and the cupboard had other plans.

The smell is the first thing you notice, a warm, yeasty, faintly farmyard smell that clings to the towels if you don't seal the lid. I learned to tape the edges and stack the tub on a tray, because the escapees, and there are always escapees, find their way into the linen and then into the bathroom and then you're explaining to a visitor why there's a worm in the face flannel.

Feeding the hedgehog became a nightly ritual. A small handful scattered on the slab by the fence, then I'd sit by the kitchen window with the light off and watch him arrive, a shuffling grey comma with a nose like a vacuum. He'd hoover the worms, pause, look up as if surprised they were gone, and shuffle off. Some nights a second, smaller one came, and then there were two, and the tub had to work harder.

I started sharing the surplus with the blue tits, who figured out the feeder above the mealworm tub within a week and now stage what can only be described as a daily raid. The colony, which I'd begun to find faintly alarming, became a tiny larder that fed more of the garden than I'd intended, which is the nicest kind of problem to have.

The lesson, if there is one, is that nature doesn't do portion control. Give it warmth and a potato slice and it will outbreed your good intentions every time. I keep the tub now, topped up and taped, and I've made peace with the fact that I am a person who farms worms in the airing cupboard for a hedgehog I've never properly met. He eats. The tits eat. The beetles breed. The towels smell faintly of a barn. We all have our arrangements.

Cleaning the tub is the part nobody mentions when they tell you to buy mealworms. Every couple of weeks the bran goes musty and the dead husks pile up and you tip the whole seething mass into a sieve over the bath and try not to think too hard about what's in your plumbing. The beetles, unbothered by the indignity, climb the sides and stare. I've made peace with it the way you make peace with any chore that feeds something you love.

The life cycle, once you see it properly, is oddly mesmerising. Egg to worm to pupa to beetle, a loop that runs on warmth and a slice of potato, and runs faster than any pet owner intends. I started keeping a vague tally, a jar of shed skins and the occasional escaped wanderer, and gave up when the numbers stopped meaning anything. The colony doesn't care about my records. It cares about the potato.

My neighbour, pegging washing near the cupboard vent one summer, asked what the faint smell was and I lied, badly, about a damp towel. She didn't believe me, but she's polite, and the hedgehog, fatter by the week, is my quiet defence. If the price of a healthy garden visitor is a white lie about the airing cupboard, I'll pay it, and I'll keep the tub taped, and I'll keep the worms.

The hedgehog, the real reason for any of this, grew visible in his sides by autumn, a rounder shadow at the fence, and then one cold night he didn't come, and the tub kept breeding anyway, for the tits, for the frogs in spring, for the next hedgehog who finds the slab. I didn't name him. You don't name a visitor who may not return. But I'd know his shuffle anywhere, and I keep the worms for it.

There's a satisfaction in the cupboard I didn't expect, the small proof that I'm keeping something alive, several somethings, through the simple act of taping a lid and slicing a potato. The hedgehog fatter, the tits bolder, the beetles indifferent, all of it running on a system I barely understand and certainly don't control. I farm worms in the airing cupboard, and I've stopped apologising for it. The garden, in its quiet way, is fed, and so, somehow, am I.