I didn’t blog a lot in 2012. This was largely due to the disastrous weather and total washout in the garden. To sum it up: nothing grew and we barely went outside because it rained and rained and rained. This picture sums it up.
There’s something simultaneously uplifting and heartbreaking at my children’s British refusal to let the rain ruin a summer.
I say nothing grew, but we did have a good crop of peas, and the spinach did pretty well too. But my appetite was dulled when I went to gather spinach and recoiled at a slug brazenly oozing across a leaf as I went to pluck it. I mean, in a normal year they at least wait until after dark to come out.
But that wasn’t the worst of it. In a realisation (like something from a sci-fi film where a human encounters an alien pupa and then the frame cuts rapidly to wider and wider shots to reveal not one but hundreds of the things) I looked across from the offending slug to realise that our entire crop was bending under their weight, all black and glistening in the perma-rain. I went off the spinach after that.
But no matter, because we have high hopes for this year. Top of my list is building a proper treehouse for the kids, in the crown of the apple tree and work commenced today when I put up the scaffold, cut out the clutter of branches in the heart of the tree and mapped out the floor structure using bamboo canes.
We planned it all out after seeing The Swiss Family Robinson. This one will have walls, a roof, a telescope to look into the park, a rope ladder from the apple to the pear tree. I’d like a spiral slide down from the pear tree, but no luck so far on ebay.
Oh, and I need to get this one complete by summer, as Kate and I have a pact that she will buy me a course in making your own pizza oven for my birthday, if I make her a pizza oven for her birthday. The clock is ticking.
One man and his garden 