More real life

So a while back now, there were those posts about the vegetable patch, and the bounty, and the bottling, and the trying to find new ways of eating zucchini, and so on.

I've been feeling a bit bad about these posts for a while now, in case you were still under the impression that I was managing The Good Life while working full time. I am not. Not at all. And especially not now that I'm the sole gardener, with our neighbours having temporarily moved to the other side of the world.

Last year I tried, but rain. Which meant first, weeds. And second, slugs. I have never seen so many slugs. I'm not sure what happened - did their numbers build up in the previous years to a suddenly evident plague? Or was it because the field next door wasn't mown until very late in the year, meaning an extra quarter acre of prime slug breeding habitat? All I know is it was nightmare material. You'd walk out and there'd be giant crawling slugs everywhere, really, just everywhere.

I tried beer traps, I tried snipping all I saw in two. It made no difference to their numbers. It was very dispiriting, but I took heart in my species' track record with extinctions and moved it up a level.

That's a good half kilo there, and I collected several bags like this. I didn't manage an extinction, but it helped. But the rain also meant, third, not that many weekends where I could actually plant anything. And then fourth, tomato blight. Add in me not having much time to harvest what there was, and everyone else who forgot, and there was not much bounty last year.

But! 2014 was a new year and I was ever hopeful! I started well, I really did - for the first time ever, I cleared the entire area of weeds, and then only planted what I figured could reasonably manage.

Only then, rain again, and slugs. Bags and more bags of slugs. But still it was going well, until around mid-June, after which we were either away or had guests or were doing something every weekend until mid-September.

Of course, I was very happy to be away and have guests and have done something else than endlessly tend to the vegetable patch ... but still, it was a bit of a shock when we retuned from Japan to find: 

Well, OK, so it actually doesn't look so bad from a distance... but let's get a bit closer.

That's the onion section, overrun with strawberries. Can't see the onions? There's actually quite a lot of them...

There's one! 

Poor, poor overgrown then blighted tomatoes.

Broccoli gone to seed. Though to be honest, I did get one harvest - this was meant to be the second. 

This was perhaps the most cruel. A broccoli stump, in a slug protector, completely eaten by slugs. And to add further salt to the wound, overgrown with weeds. Dandelions, for the most part.

Did you know artichokes have pretty purple flowers? I certainly didn't. (Leeks have pretty purple flowers too, it turns out.)

Flowers long gone to seed, taking over the rocket.

And finally at the back, a raggedy sunflower forest.

So there you go, another not very successful year. Maybe 2016?