Bindweed Us Together Lord

The build-up is beginning, excitement is mounting and the days are being counted down. Can it be only four days to go till the moment everyone has been waiting for?  All the tension and fuss preceding the World Cup finals was as a baby's belch compared to the global pandemonium surrounding the momentous event so rapidly approaching. Matt Swan is due to make his debut appearance as a market trader.  Not the kind that shuffles trillions of dollars around in derivatives and other nefarious financial instruments, heedless of the sheer insanity of a world dependent on a gambling machine too complex for anyone to fully understand.  No, on Sunday he will be standing behind an actual market stall, under a banner proudly proclaiming his business name 'New Leaf', offering his carefully-nurtured vegetable produce to the good people of Dinas Mawddwy.

Almost my entire harvest of broad beans... not much sadly

That is, if he has any actual vegetable produce to sell by then. This must be what's causing the nervousness, the sheer agitation that can be witnessed across a million Twitter feeds as his followers share their worries about the big day in question. They know he is confident that things will turn out all right in the end but they can't help but be concerned that much of the produce originally planned for sale is no longer viable for one reason or another.  Either the foodstuff has been harvested already as it has 'bolted', i.e. flowered too early, such as the spinach, the coriander, the rocket and the mizuna, or it hasn't ripened as quickly as expected, such as the tomatoes, the cucumbers and the runner beans. Or, as in the case of the broad beans, it's just given a small harvest which has already been sold.

Golden Mange Tout and a bunch of Coriander

As much of the rest of the garden is already committed to the veg bag scheme in Machynlleth, this doesn't leave a lot to place on the market stall. However, all is not lost. The lettuces are all growing well so I can make several nice-looking salad bags, along with a sign-up sheet to attract a few more customers to my salad bag local delivery service. The twelve courgette plants are now beginning to churn out their slender stripey green fruit so I'll have several spare to sell, beyond the ten courgettes a week I'm providing to the veg bag scheme. I might be able to make a pack or two of mange tout and coriander. And every day I'm in the polytunnel urging the few small green tomatoes to turn red, at least enough to make one punnet.

The first courgettes

On top of all this nervous tension, this week also brought a few unwelcome surprises. A slug in the fridge was the least of it (I finally worked out it how it got there – hitching a ride in with a cabbage I'd bought from the “Fresh and Local” stall). On Saturday I found two pheasants within the pheasant-proof fence. Admittedly they were trying desperately to get out rather than eating my veg, but it does mean the fencing is less impregnable than I'd ideally like, i.e. completely impregnable. Unlike the slug I've yet to figure out how they got in. And the day before that I had literally unearthed a bigger problem than that – a mass of underground creeping weed roots appears to be spreading throughout my polytunnel soil. They are thin and white and break into pieces very easily. The roots seem thinner than bindweed but it might just be that at an early stage. It hasn't produced any leaves or indeed anything at all above ground. I suspect it came in with the horse manure which I've dug in everywhere. Short of tearing all my plants down in a frenzy, there's little I can do till the end of the growing season.

Bindweed? Whatever it is, it's evil.

Still it's always good to count your blessings as well as your curses, and I had three good blessings this week in the shape of three friends visiting me, all for their first time, and bringing food and alcohol to keep me sustained. With friends like that, no bindweed in the world can stop me.