Thoughts of a levitating garden

8 October 2007

It turns out that you have a better chance of seeing photos of my veg patch if I upload them to Flickr, rather than just keeping them in a folder on my desktop. So that is what I have done. It’s all winding down out there now, so it’s nothing like as pretty and green as it was in the summer. I’ve been pulling up sweetcorn plants that have finished and “harvesting” several useless secondary cobs that between them produced one niblet. I’m not kidding.

The pumpkins are still sprawling all over the place, though yesterday I cut off the vine that had marched onto the lawn. It had had several chances to produce something worthwhile, but it kept failing, so I chopped it off. I need to do the same to the one that’s climbing the back of Juniper Lodge sometime. It’s not producing any flowers, but it looks quite nice and isn’t tripping anyone up, so it can stay for a while yet.

At least the slugs can’t reach things that are dangling several feet from the ground. Maybe I should plant everything on some kind of magic elevation next time. I’ve been going out to the patch every night recently on slug patrol. I must surely be making an impact on their slimy population. I used to be picking up 3 a night without even trying (feel free to take that statement out of context) and now it’s 2 a night after a bit of a search in the dark corners. Maybe next year I should just edge the patch with a thick salt border, like some kind of witch who doesn’t want her lettuce nibbled.

I’ve bought some garlic that needs to go into the ground soon, but the patch I have in mind for it is currently full of sweetcorn plants whose cobs are not yet ready to eat. I wish they’d damn well hurry up, I want to do some digging and get the garlic in. It won’t be ready to harvest until next summer and the frosts of the winter will be what make the cloves split and form bulbs. My kind of gardening really: stick something in the ground, leave it to fend for itself over winter and go back to it when the sun returns.