It Doesn't Rain...

If you don't live in Britain you may be unaware of the appalling weather we have had so far this year. Quite comically we started the season with a hosepipe ban and this was followed with the wettest few months ever recorded. Now us Brit's are reasonably hardy folk when it comes to bad weather (that is unless is snows, only a few inches can throw us into the most awful quandary and general panic and disorder ensues). Don't get me wrong we like to moan about it, but a bit of rain doesn't, generally, stop us in our tracks...this is after all Great Britain and rain to us is like sand in the desert...a fact of life. This year however has been, quite frankly, bloody ridiculous. No sun = nothing is growing. Even the highest of land is surface flooding. It's a nightmare. I thought last year was bad when we were picking crops 6 weeks later than we should have been, but nothing is growing this year and as the months go by our veg growing efforts are looking more and more like a disaster. It's also impossible to get out in the garden. After two washed out weekends our garden was starting to look like a bit of a mess:

In desperate need of a good mow and a trim

Even though the veg side of things is grim, the chicken's have settled in nicely. They figured where to roost on the first night with no intervention from me and are now enjoying peck in around in the enclosure. We are also seeing the first eggs which is very exciting!! The wormery is going well too. We have discovered that they love carrot peelings. Here is a picture of our pretty girls and not so pretty worm friends:

Charlie proudly showing off one of our first eggs!

Back to the garden. We unleashed minion 5 on the weeds and gave the lawn a bit of a mow and it's looking a lot better out there. We're hoping for a late harvest and haven't given up on our crops! That said, we are sick of being slaves to our fickle climate and have decided to get a greenhouse. At least we can have a bash at controlling conditions in there. I feel another blog entry coming on :-)

Minion 5 hard at work

'I wouldn't have done it like that..'

Charlie Vs The Slugs!

It's been tipping down with rain and nothing much is happening in the Minion Garden so I thought I'd devote this blog to Charlie's diligent and often novel approaches to pest control. However, before I begin I will need to further explain Charlie and Minion 1's (as he is an integral cog in Charlie's pest war) unique relationship.

Imagine two very cheeky, very naughty, teenage boys. You know the type.... They're the ones that teachers call 'characters', always up to mischief and never where they're supposed to be but they somehow get away with it because they are amusing and ultimately likeable and 'generally harmless'. These boys will always have a plan hatching and when it goes spectacularly wrong will shrug and announce that 'it seemed like a good idea at the time'..... Got the picture in your mind....OK, now picture that one of these boys is actually a man, aka My Charlie and the other is Minion 1. That's what we're dealing with.

Charlie was, before last year, a stranger to gardening. He took to it immediately but soon discovered with the soaring heights of horticultural success come the lows of calamitous climate and pernicious pests. The most heinous of the latter Charlie soon identified at the common garden slug. Any gardener knows the havoc these slimy critters cause.  However, when Charlie first discovered slug devastation (when they made a feast of his newly planted runner beans)..he took it personally, and so the slug war began.

When an indignant Charlie quizzed me about slugs and possible ways to defeat them I told him of the usual methods of keeping them at bay i.e copper rings, beer traps and going out at night and picking them off the greenery. Little did I know that he would take these ideas and run with them...

I often ponder what our neighbours think of us. We are friendly with the neighbours on either side of us but of the people in the houses that back on to our garden are unknown to us. We did have an encounter with the neighbours at the bottom of the garden when one of our chickens escaped into their garden and we had to go round and rescue it out of their tree. I was 8 months pregnant at the time and we knocked on their door wearing wellies and carrying a cardboard box and a towel. We were very polite and apologetic but I'm pretty sure they thought we were nuts.

Charlie and Minion 1's first wave of attack on the slugs probably didn't do much to improve relations when they took my 'pick them off the greenery at night' idea and gave it steroids.Imagine what these people must have thought when they looked out of their windows night after night to see two men with headtorches on and kitchen knives in their hands crawling around stabbing at the lawn.....I'm amazed someone didn't call the men in white coats.

Even though it was pretty amusing seeing them crawling around in the garden with head torches on it wasn't as amusing as their attempts to rid the garden of cabbage butterflies. 

However securely we netted the brassicas those pesky butterflies found a way in. I'd pick off the caterpillars and try to minimise the damage but that wasn't good enough for the chuckle brothers. Charlie's plan for the demise of the cabbage butterflies was to unleash Minion 1 on them.....He armed him with a badminton racket and instructions to kill anything white and fluttery that dared to approach the brassica patch.... fire and forget. This was the most spectacularly ineffective and highly amusing plan ever. I'd be sitting in the front room and I'd hear a roar of indignation from Minion 1's cave followed by him sprinting through the house holding his badminton racket with a look of steely determination on his face. If you rushed to the window you would be treated to the sight of Minion 1 jumping around madly, slashing the racket in the air and uttering half formed expletives while the butterflies leisurely fluttered up and hovered just above his reach.....excellent :-)

These days, having lost Minion 1 to medical school (see what I did there, dropped it in again, you've got to admit, I'm good) Charlie has scaled operations and is often seen buying value beer in Sainsburys, not to drown his sorrows you understand, but to lace his slug traps in the garden.

Or perhaps that's what he wants us to think and is secretly devising a slug killing robot....I'll keep you posted :-)