I like Gardening

That means I like to get out into the dirt to pull weeds and put in plants. I especially like to grow as much as I can of what we eat - and most summers it's more of a problem to use all I grow than anything else. Even with sharing my surplus with my neighbours and putting it out on the street free food trolley I often have a glut that I need to preserve in various ways.

Not this summer though. It started off really well. I got the seeds in on time - not always the case I'm ashamed to say - and the seedlings planted out. And that's where the problems started.  One of our neighbours has a curry tree. These are very pretty with delicate fern-like leaves which are great to flavour food. I have one in a pot and find it very useful but unfortunately they are also horribly invasive if they are in the ground. Their roots spread for huge distances and sucker like crazy - and that was the start of my gardening woes. Attracted by my well fertilised and watered vegetable garden the tree has sent its roots under the fence, spreading up and across the whole of the area and into the neighbour's yard on the other side of ours. The main roots are sending up suckers everywhere and there's also a dense tangle of small fibrous roots making it difficult to get even a sharp spade through them.

I did manage to dig a few beds and put in my seedlings and despite the root competition by dint of regular fertilising it was looking like we'd be okay. Then one morning I went out to have a look around and the top of some of the beans - their growing tips and the leaves halfway down - were gone, completely stripped off to bare stalks. I looked and looked but couldn't see the cause - no insects and it didn't look like bird or rodent damage. It was a puzzle.

Next morning all the beans had been given the same treatment as had the rockmelons I had growing up the fence. I could not still find what was doing it but every day more plants were being stripped and soon despite my covering up the growing shoots the beans, the rockmelons and the cape gooseberries were just sticks. At the same time the beetroot plants were rapidly disappearing although I couldn't see any sign that their leaves were under the same attack.

The zucchinis and cucumbers apparently weren't appealing to whatever it was so they continued to fruit as did the capsicums, eggplant and tomatoes and we could still pick some chard most days. Then I noticed tooth marks in the green tomatoes and soon there were half eaten fruit every morning. This turned out to be rats. These are the bane of every suburban vegetable garden because they are clever and agile - they went as far as to pull off the covers I put on some of the developing fruit. I read somewhere that they don't like some strong odours and the suggestion - much to Miss I'm Nearly Four's amusement - was to put peppermint oil on cotton wool balls and place them around the garden.  That seems to have worked although it takes time and effort because if the cotton balls get wet they lose the smell so they have to be removed for watering. Since by this point all but four of the tomato plants had died it wasn't really too onerous a task.

That wasn't the end of my trials, though. For some unknown reason the cucumbers have all turned up their toes now and even usually reliable plants like spring onions are not doing well. The final blow came when I went out to pick the butternut squashes that had ripened and found several where some sort of fungus was eating away at them where they had been lying on the ground, two had split completely open and ants had established a colony of aphids on another. I probably shouldn't complain too much about this because I already have around twenty squash stored away and there are more coming on but it felt like the last straw at the time.

Despite all of this the capsicums, eggplants and a few herbs are still thriving. Of the herbs the sweet basil is doing particularly well. The photo at the top of the post is of a small section of the basil bed - the small plants among the basil are calendulas which I grow for their flowers. I've already made and frozen four lots of pesto and it looks like there'll be more ready to pick in a few days. Without any idea of what has been stripping the plants and with at least another month of very hot weather to come there seems little point in replanting anything else since with the way things have been going this year a new plague could arrive at any moment.

PS Miss I'm Nearly Four visited again today and was very disappointed to find that we couldn't harvest any vegetables but she did manage to score some strawberries from the hanging baskets and blueberries from those growing in pots.