July Medley

Rain stops play

We were warned of drought, we were promised drought. Dire prophesies of brown, dust-dry gardens, death to all plants requiring even a modicum of moisture, hosepipe bans and helicopters snooping for the telltale green lawn.

Gardeners were encouraged to rip up the grass, lay gravel over membrane and plant all those sun-loving mediterranean plants everyone loved from their sunny holidays.

We were all going to bask in un-English semi-tropical summers and pluck grapes from our arbours.

But it rains.

For the last two years records have been broken again and again for above average precipitation. Flood has followed deluge and blight has followed mould. Sandals and sunglasses have been replaced by wellies and umbrellas.

Those mediterranean lovelies languished and stretched with all that wet and succumbed to winter rot.

The happiest people are the weather forecasters who have a wild glint in the eye and sound of rising glee in the voice as they announce, 'Yet more unseasonal weather'. The rare sunny day is followed by two or more wet.

White skies, drizzle, no ripe tomatoes, an autumnal feeling in July...

Summer? Bah Humbug!

July

Front Row

We're lucky in our road. The front gardens are too small to park cars so I have the pleasure each morning of perusing the garden personality of each house I pass on my walk to work. There are the 'gravel chips and potted box' enclosures, the 'let's brighten the place up with a bit of busy lizzie' plots and the 'hiding behind my hedge' gardens. Then there are the 'we're doing the house up first', the 'as long as it's tidy', and the 'landscaped ready for sale' gardens.

  Favourites are the all-in-a-jumble areas full of wind-blown poppies and evening primrose which seem to care for themselves, and the garden with a small flowered climbing red rose, red-berried cotoneaster and red geraniums on the window sills which exactly match the crimson of the front door. How clever, how restrained.

My garden comes into the 'too full for its own good' category because I can't stop acquiring plants and cramming them into containers. Result- watering nightmare and vine weevil heaven. 

Something stinks...

A strange phenomenon affected some of our allotments. It appeared about June and took the form of fern shaped potato leaves. Initially this was treated with mild curiosity and a suggestion that the weather was to blame, but it soon became obvious that there was a more serious cause. Allotmenteers looked at their neighbours with suspicion - was some digressor using weed killer on a breezy day?

But no - through the media grape vine, RHS website and eventually Gardeners' Question Time the truth did out. Yet again another new and probably uneccesary agri-chemical has been developed. A hormone weedkiller which binds itself to the structure of the grass grown for livestock feed and is capable of passing through the animal and remaining active in the manure.

All the organic growers who believe in keeping their soil in good heart by feeding it with honest muck have poisoned the earth with contaminated manure and have been advised not to eat their produce, to leave the ground fallow for a year and regularly rotavate.

And if we are being advised not to eat the veg what about the livestock that were fed the grass? Is anyone testing the meat and milk? I doubt it.