These were once cucumber seedlings. A snail forced itself under the propagator lid and ate the lot. I don’t know how, because that lid was tight. But here we are. We are in the middle of the great slug and snail invasion of 2024, brought to us by eight months of rain and storms interspersed with flashes of heat. I am well aware that I am far from the only one dealing with this, but given how many gardens around here are decked or concreted, I seem to be very much the target of the local slimers’ attention. On top of that, I have urban foxes and squirrels bringing daily destruction. Yesterday I found a pepper plant on the ground and a peanut sitting neatly in its place in its pot.
Don’t get me started on the bindweed flooding n from next door’s garden and strangling everything that hasn’t been fully eaten.
This is why my insomnia manifested as laying awake until 330am thinking about ways to reconfigure chunks of the garden. And why I have blearily started my day with putting a tape measure to parts of the garden and dropping a couple hundred quid on supplies and construction materials.
On the other hand, I gave the roses their first proper prune in years over the winter, and they’ve come back strong:
I am eating a bowl of strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, pomegranate seeds and almonds. Inbox 131 and that will not change today. I have to go deep into a story document and not come out until it’s fixed.