Rambling On

I’m back, no excuses, so as Led Zeppelin would say let’s Ramble On !

Having moved house during the blog’s hiatus, I now have the responsibility for the upkeep of a fair sized garden as well as the allotment, and being more of a farmer than a gardener (as I explained here), it’s taking some coming to terms with.

I suppose you could call it a cottage garden, in that there are many beds of  “herbacious perennials”, as they say on Gardeners World, which I really don’t know much about. Here's a couple of shots from earlier in the year.

My inner control freak is telling me to just dig them up and replace them with something more manageable, like turf ! However I am resisting the urge, and just letting things be for this season, whilst I at least learn what things are.

As a consequence, the allotment, which has been a little neglected this past year, is getting a spring clean, in summer, to within an inch of its life. You can almost see the weeds cowering as I march down the plot with freshly sharpened hoe at the ready, passing my trusty leeks standing proudly to attention.     

As for the snails, that have been having a field day with the wet weather and my laziness of late,  weapons of molluscular destruction have had to be deployed, yes slug pellets. I’m reluctant to use them, but however many lettuce munchers I chuck into next doors plot, they never seem to diminish.

Talking to one of the old fellas, he tells me that they actually return home to the plot, “you know, like pigeons”, he said,  and that he’d actually done an experiment where he’d marked one with some nail varnish , took it a good distance from his plot, and within a day it had returned. 

Now that’s just weird, I mean, what the heck’s he doing with nail varnish down at the allotments !

Molluscophobia.

Picked a couple of cauliflowers today, and I was reminded that they were the first vegetables I ever attempted to grow.  Don’t ask me why, as they must be one of the most awkward and I didn’t particularly like them back then, but now I love them.

At the time we were a newly married young couple living in a ground floor rented flat that had no garden at all, only a small patch of bare soil at the back that barely saw any daylight never mind sunshine.

It was when the Good Life was on television, the first time around (God I’m getting old), and I fancied Felicity Kendal was hooked on the series. I wanted to grow vegetables just like they did and be self-sufficient, but I hadn’t got a clue what to do. I diligently dug this tiny bit of earth, bought a packet of seeds, carefully sowed them just as it said on the packet, and waited for what seemed forever.

I checked for signs of life everyday, but nothing happened, then to my surprise after a few weeks, some little seedlings eventually struggled through into what should have been daylight.

Oh how I nurtured those delicate little plants, and as I’d avidly watched Gardener’s World I knew I had to guard against weeds and slugs. There was no need to worry about weeds, as nothing grew there of its own accord, but slugs were another matter altogether.

The backyard where the patch was situated was both dark and damp, with ferns growing out of the wet wall where the guttering overflowed. It was a slug heaven if ever there was one and you could see their trails everywhere. Any stone or brick you turned over would reveal a family of the horrible things living under it and they even got into the kitchen through the air bricks.

Yes we had House Slugs, and more than once I trod on one at night making my way to the bathroom through the kitchen. I once went to get a knife out the cutlery drawer and the handle moved when I grasped it, Arghh !  Oh yes it was, and I developed something of a phobia of the things after that, hence the title above.

We tried, the usual methods like putting salt down, but that didn’t stop them, they just laughed and tossed it over their shoulders for good luck. Someone suggested beer, but they had a party and got pissed on it I think, it would have been better to just drink it myself and not be bothered about them.

So it was a constant battle to keep them off my precious little cauliflower plants, that were struggling for dear life as it was in those pitiful conditions.

Then one fateful morning I found just the stalks left, they had been devastated by a rapacious slug army. Not only had these evil molluscs damaged me psychologically for life, they were now trying to rob me of my inner farmer.

Thankfully I overcame this setback and went on to future vegetable success, but I never got over my fear and loathing of slugs, and I can be turned into a quivering jelly at the sight of just one, especially those big black ones that look like liquorice!!!!!

Friend or Foe

This last season the whole site was plagued with Cabbage White butterfly, and everyone seemed to suffer no matter what they did. I tried netting all the brassicas with, what I thought, was a narrow enough mesh to keep them out and prevent them laying eggs. However, the day I saw butterflies fluttering in and out of the netting at will, I knew my plan had been foiled and it could only be a matter of time before the caterpillars appeared.

It’s a strange irony that though allotment holders are typically people who appreciate the wonders of nature, they have to deal ruthlessly with it at times. It’s similar to the idea that a weed is only a plant growing in the wrong place, I suppose. One minute you can be enjoying watching these beautiful insects dancing about in the summer sun, and the next be chasing them like a lunatic, with a cane, as they try and lay their eggs on your precious cabbages.

Not that I'm of any religious persuasion that sanctifies the protection of life in all its forms or anything, but it was with a certain reluctance that I had to go round all the plants and destroy any eggs by hand. Funnily enough, I found the netting made the job much more difficult, and don’t think I’ll bother at all with it next season.

I thought I had got them all, then one day when focusing more closely on something strange on a particular plant, I realised with horror that I was looking at a seething mass of caterpillars! As I had decided to not use any insecticides, there was only one thing for it but to literally pick them all off and dispatch them. Not a pleasant job.

The Cabbage White season came and went, and I’d almost forgotten about them, when one day in the shed I noticed a caterpillar stuck to the roof. Ah, an escapee I thought, nicely settling down to pupate, and my first reaction was to destroy it and the others that were there. Then I noticed what I thought were a bunch of eggs attached to it, but something wasn’t quite right, caterpillars don’t lay eggs.


After some googling, the puzzle was eventually solved. The “eggs” turned out to be the tiny larvae of a small parasitic wasp called Cotesia glomerata, that spin a yellow silk cocoon around themselves.

In this picture you can just make out the wasp at the side of the caterpillar.


The wasp parasitizes the Cabbage White caterpillar, by laying it’s eggs in the caterpillar’s body. Then, like something out of a horror movie, the larvae feed on the living caterpillar and eventually emerge to spin their cocoons. What’s more bizarre is that they don’t eat the caterpillar’s vital organs, so that the life of the host is prolonged as long as possible, and they even control the host’s behaviour by causing it to stay with the cocoon cluster.

So now, any that I find in the shed, are left for my new found little friends to do their gory job on.

Isn't nature just wonderful!!!