The Good Life

Apprently 2007 is going to be the year of the slug.The conditions this year have been perfect for slug love and apparently the country is on the brink of a plague as the little gastropods breed like there’s no tomorrow.

According to Dr Bill Lankford of the Bayer CropScience slug-watch program, the total slug population will be nearly 15 billion if his slug per square metre counts are repeated across the country. We need more hedgehogs.

The picture below is our last big haul until the rest of the crops come of age. We can then move onto recipes involving sweetcorn, cucumber, squash and tomatoes.

Our broccoli and cauliflower aren’t looking like they will produce much, but there are two cabbages which are starting to look like champions.

But he did give me some top tips on cooking with courgettes on telly tonight so I’ll give him that. Lucky really because the courgettes are producing at a rate of knots.

Tomorrow I shall be making a carbonara with courgettes and I also plan to make a courgette salad with mackerel. Of course, I will claim these as my own creations.

Rob has made gazpatcho soup and a something-or-other ( I forget, it was Italian ) with his, but I still fear we will exhaust before our plants do.

Some more research (ok, Jamie Olivers web page) reveals that we ought not to let individual fruits grow too large else it will curtail their overall production. Perhaps that is the key to their taming.

The weather has gone bad again with severe weather warnings for this weekend, but we are off up on thursday to get more peas. And courgettes.

We’ve been up every few days this last week for watering purposes, as the weather has finally decided to act like it should do at this time of year.

Each visit has rewarded us both with a handful of tasty morsels to supplement our evil shop bought perishables; I await the day when I have no need for Mr Sainsbury and his veggie section. Well, at least until winter.

The peas, onions, courgettes and lettuce are in constant flow now, and we will soon hit the motherlode with our tomato crop. The sweetcorn, squash and cucumber have a way to go yet and so do the brassicas, but we hope they will be producing as our first lot finish.

The allotment is looking a bit overgrown now, but we plan to have a strim and dig session in the next few weekends and also start thinking about some winter crops to stick in. All in all it’s going well.

We’ve not seen Judy and her mum for quite a while. We assumed they had either spontaneously combusted or gone on holiday. Unfortunately we’ve since discovered it was the latter. Damn shame, our plans for expansion thwarted at the first opportunity. We could do with a shed and some more land.

More pics from the latest haul. First up, the salad drawer of plenty:

And me proudly standing next to our last collection.

Apparently Moira thinks we’ve just left college. Gawd bless ‘er