Rest When I'm Dead

Three 10-metre beds of lettuce - I hope people want to buy it all!

Picture the scene. It's the end of a long day in the office. You have been working on three different tasks, one a report that your boss needs first thing tomorrow, the other two are longer-term but with deadlines near the end of the month. Today one of them has involved you pulling in certain experts across the company for their views which you're not sure you have captured completely accurately, but your notes on your computer are as detailed as you could get them.  You rush out to try to catch the 7:14pm home.

A bean wigwam

Overnight someone breaks in. Rather than simply taking the computers as any decent burglar might, this incognito troublemaker finds your laptop and somehow logs in. To your dismay the next morning you find certain files modified, and others apparently vanished. The notes from yesterday's meetings have been wiped. The boss' report has been heavily edited, most of it deleted. It takes you most of the morning to rewrite the documents, relying on memory, and you're not that happy with the results. The next night, the same thing happens. And the next night. The police are called and make the right noises but as nothing physical is missing you get the feeling they are not going to bust a gut to find the criminal.

Now you know how I feel about slugs. 

Buttercups prettify my polytunnel exterior

I spend hours carefully teasing out lettuces one at a time from their seed tray, pulling their roots gently away from the others, and planting them in soil which often needs a bit of extra rotted manure dug in first, then watering each one around the base making sure the leaves are not caught in the flow (they are easily damaged, and the sun could scorch wet leaves). During the night a rampage of slugs, mostly tiny ones, slide out from their daytime hiding places and gorge themselves senseless on the vulnerable plants. The next morning I might find 20% of them killed, and others with one of their two leaves missing so reducing their chances of survival. This is why I'm going out at 10pm each night with a headtorch and spending at least an hour going round everything, picking them all off - their destination, the river. The big ones I don't mind so much, at least I can easily see them and pluck them from their breakfast. It's the little critters I hate, they're so fiddly, but just as deadly when en masse.

 Some of my many many cabbages

Anyway, enough about slugs, I hear you drawl. You were banging on about them last week. The only thing worse than a bore on their pet subject is a bore whose pet subject is slugs.

So let me share with you some of my non-slug-related activities of the last seven days. I have direct-sowed four metres of "Mooli" radish, the long white Asian type, and sowed in pots twelve fennel seeds, two more melon seeds and three butternut squash (some earlier-sown ones have sprouted already). I've replaced four dead or dying sweetcorn seedlings with four fresh ones, and done the same with nine climbing french bean plants, two runner bean plants and many lettuces. I made a wigwam out of bamboo poles and planted nine french bean seedlings around the base (of the climbing type I hope!) Many other plants in pots got big enough to be planted outside in the soil - one red cabbage, three dwarf french bean plants, fourteen green cabbages, fifteen red orache (a beautiful ruby-leaved salad plant), seventeen broccoli, 24 kale, 50 "Morton's Secret Mix" lettuce, 63 beetroot, and 90 "Australian Yellowleaf" lettuce. Into the polytunnel soil went the last four tomato plants and the first four yellow courgette plants. And a grand total of 189 cabbages have been potted on (ie removed from the module where it began life and given a larger pot of its own). Yes, you read that right - I've gone cabbage-tastic this year. There are more on their way too. Lest we forget, all these young seedlings need watering each day because they're under cover, and given the recent hot weather I've been watering outside a bit too.

Somehow I've had to squeeze all that in around certain paid odd-jobs that came up this week, joining a crew at a carpenter's workshop to make up wall panels and painting moveable steps and a lectern (it's for a conference in Brick Lane apparently) and then loading the lorry with them all, weeding the grounds at the local health centre, and giving a piano lesson.

And of course while I'm busy doing all the aforementioned, those darn garden weeds will keep on growing. One day I'll have to get round to doing something about it. Now, as I was saying about those slugs...