Garden in the Rain
With the rain at bay for a few hours we headed to the plot to get on with some tasks that had been awaiting our attention for some time.
Most of our plants really are coming along well now due to the warm, wet weather. No doubt they’ll need more sunshine later to ripen nicely, but for now the conditions for growing are pretty good. Mustn’t grumble.
It’s great at this time of year when every trip to the plot presents you with noticeable changes to your plants. As they grow stronger the slugs will also have a harder time decimating them so completely.
Soft Fruit Sunday
One particular job that had been on the list for a long time and kept getting ignored was to totally net the walk-in fruit cage that we built last autumn.
Until now there hasn’t been much on the plants to attract birds but the situation is changing rapidly. We’ve spotted our feathered friends on several blatant reconnaissance missions lately and are determined not to lose any fruit to them.
Armed with a staple gun and a enough netting to make a trawlerman jealous we set to. As it turned out it was a pretty easy task – despite the staple gun getting tangled in the netting every two seconds.
Our next job is to block up any holes around the bottom of the fruit cage to stop the mice eating what the birds now can’t.
Marigold
We’ve planted quite a few marigolds. We must have got them cheap somewhere but they brighten up the plot and are easy to dot around and fill in odd spaces.
We found a particular marigold which was in full flower just a few days ago but has now been eaten down to a disappointing stump.
Extensive forensic analysis of the crime scene makes us think that a slug might be responsible – due to the telltale shimmering trails. But do slugs eat marigolds?
Perhaps it was a rabbit, who then coaxed some slugs over the top of the marigold stump to throw us off the scent.
Who knows? Obviously not us.
Carrot Rope
All of our carrots were eaten by slugs. We think our whole allotment, including the shed, might well be eaten by slugs at some point soon.
Other plot-holders have head their carrots disappear to slugs too. The carrots of a friend from an allotment across town suffered the same fate.
A heavily experienced plotter even told us, with a sense of foreboding, ‘Apparently it’s going to be a bad year for carrots’.
This has spurred us into action. We will see if the Great Carrot Curse of 2014 holds any power over our second sowing that is now safely protected in the coldframe.
