In The Night Garden (And The Day)

My first stall of the year at the local farmer's market. Not laden with produce but it's been a slow start in the garden.

And they're off! After months of sheer dilly-dallying and dawdling my plants have received the starting pistol of a decent mixture of sunshine, rain and warmth and are finally assuming the shapes and sizes that you might have expected them to have about a month ago. The cold windy May and the dry June should take the blame for this. All the other gardeners I've spoken to say their veg have been slow.

So now all my lettuces are looking healthy, large and colourful - three 10-metre beds of them plus several others dotted around elsewhere. The runner beans are halfway up the poles, the climbing french beans a little further behind. Rhubarb leaves are giant and cover the narrow paths on both sides of its bed. All the many beetroot seedlings are planted out and are growing at different rates. The peas have been fruiting since two or three weeks ago - I had to add more canes to prevent the extremely tall Blauwschokker variety (with the beautiful purple flowers and pods) from bringing the whole edifice down. Dwarf french bean plants have begun to produce their spindly green fruit. The kale, both curly and Tuscan types, have mostly grown quite large. Some cabbages have formed heads and are nearly ready to harvest, while many others are much further behind.

A new bed of 83 tiny cabbages

Inside the polytunnel the 24 tomato plants are all healthy and some are above head height, all bearing some small still-green fruit. The cucumber and melon plants, seven of each, are climbing up their respective twines and boasting little yellow flowers and the beginnings of their crop behind them. I harvested my first bright yellow courgette this week. Butternut and Hokkaido squash plants, about ten in total, are still fairly small, no flowers yet. I have one solitary chili pepper growing on one chili pepper plant - another has lots of flowers so hopefully there will be more.

A melon plant

The picture is not all rosy. Nearly all my turnips bolted (making flowers instead of growing the root into a proper turnip), except about three. A similar story with the rocket, broccoli and Mooli radish. Most of the carrots and spinach never even sprouted above ground. Slugs eat the young fennel before they get a chance to thrive. A lot of the cabbages are looking a bit peaky - purple and crinkled instead of a healthy green - so they're getting a dose of “blood-fish-and-bone” powder which might supply some nutrients they are lacking. The outdoor courgettes, poor things, are much smaller than their pampered polytunnel brothers, their flowers are in tatters from tiny slugs and the courgettes so far have been the size of my little finger. The Tuscan kale is badly slug-eaten and many leaves are mottled yellow. Those beautiful slugs also love to eat holes in the Australian Yellowleaf lettuces (I have about a hundred of them) - severely limiting the number of leaves that can go in the salad bags.

Not looking that healthy?

On Monday I ordered two large packs of “Nemaslug” containing a total of sixty million nematodes Phasmarhabditis hermaphrodita which infect only slugs and ushers them to an untimely end. It's an organic, biological control. There should be enough to cover the whole garden and polytunnel. It's not cheap but I am beginning to get fed up of spending between an hour and two hours every night picking hundreds of the tiny buggers off the plants. Unfortunately it wears off after six weeks but let's see what happens, perhaps the word will get around that my garden is a death trap. By this time next week the deed should be done, provided I get a rainy day as the nematodes don't like dry conditions. Those slugs don't know what's gonna hit 'em.