Our tortoise Karl

This is Karl der Grosse now, he has been ‘free’ living like a wild tortoise in what we call Karl’s land, next to our land, but it is wild there. We gave him his freedom last October in 2015, he came to us as a few days old baby tortoise close to death, as it had been hot for days. We did not know much about tortoises yet, although we knew that they lived on our plot of land, very shy of course one could hardly see them with all the plants, weeds and trees growing there.

It was heart-wrenching to put him out on 2nd October 2015, would he survive? We have nurtured him from so young, he had lived with us in a big box shaded from too much sun yet we took him out for a walk… he loved his clover patch which covered him almost, we sat on a stool keeping an eye on him, as there were cats around, he was not safe!

In the photos above one can see him with his favourite tomatoes, juicy, lettuce of course and I gave him some soft peaches, yummy.

We learnt much about tortoises in these years we have lived here. When we set him and Pru his lady and the little baby tortoises who had been given to us free, James arranged a feeding station for them and also a container so they had something to drink. We kept an eye on them and continued to top up their lettuce, strawberries… and other and of course the water, not regularly so they did not become reliant on us, it
worked! The pictures on the right speak for themselves.
A Hermann’s tortoise’s diet consists of vegetation. Good foods include dandelion, clover, honeysuckle, leafy salads, watercress, curly kale, brussel tops, spring greens, coriander, parsley, rocket, carrot, parsnip, courgette and bell peppers. The bulk of the vegetation should be leafy greens.