Homegrown vegetables

If I’d have written this two months ago ‘homegrown vegetables’ would have been categorized as ’stuff that should be lovely but is actually just plain irritating’. It all started so well: I had broad beans and peas heading skywards, chard nearly ready for picking and beautiful lettuces waiting to be made into salad. And then the slugs arrived. Within 3 very rainy days they levelled the lettuces, reduced the beans to twigs and made the chard look like green lace doilies. Nothing seemed to work: I tried egg shells, coffee grounds and slug hunting at twilight, but any seedlings daring to peek above ground would be demolished before I could even tell what they were. More in hope than expectation I planted runner beans at the end of July, and made little collars for them out of plastic milk cartons, in the hope that even if they didn’t prevent the slugs getting to my beans they would at least cause them some serious pain on the way there. I also caved in and bought slug pellets from an organic gardening catalogue. It may be that the last month has been less wet than July was, it may have been the pellets or the collars, but tonight I had my first homegrown runner beans for dinner and veg growing is back on the lovely list. Now I just have to think of things to do with hundreds of runner beans…