It's 9.30pm. The rain seems to have stopped. A blackbird takes the opportunity to call an end to the day over the hum a a train pulling out of the station. I'm generally not the kind to worry about the weather, I own more Gore-tex than most, but this is getting too much, even for me.
I could do with a few weeks of uninterrupted sunshine, or if that's not possible perhaps we could do as Wimbledon, close the roof, put the lights on and continue on oblivious.
The plot was looking good from a distance, well verdant at least, splashed with the orange and yellow of the calendulas. But in truth more like a day in late May than early July. Everything has suffered from the lack of light. The french beans cling like drowning sailors to the wreck of the Medusa (the hazel poles) weakly trying to pull themselves out of the abyss...and the ravenous attentions of the 'giant sea' slugs.
Normally they would explode right past them only getting the occasional nibble to the odd leaf or two. But the weather has tipped the odds in favour of the slugs. Six beans have made it past the onslaught, the other four remain as leafless stumps a few inches above the ground. The broad beans are unusually leggy and precarious, flailing around like Bambi. They will need support.
The salad seems ok, at first..well watered at least. But really it's a bit flabby, limp and not tasting of much. It's like it has just given up, gone to seed before it made enough leaf to be considered for pulling and eating.The tale of woe continues throughout the plot, the garlic and onions small, some mouldy, the tagetes are lost without trace.
We clear a lot of ground. Pulling up most of the salads, exposing densely populated shanty towns of slugs and snails beneath. The soil smells damp and fungal. We waited out time for the rain to pass under the thankfully impervious umbrella of a holly tree, then planted sweet peas up the vacant bean poles (raised in pots at home) and planted 'painted mountain' sweet corn (again raised in pots). I can only hope for their sake the sun makes an appearance soon.
We came home with some salad salvaged from the cleared greenery. I will inspect it well for slugs before eating.
