My Gardener’s Diary – July
June was a good month for sun here in Manchester, England. The sunshine has been abundant and the garden has responded with an eager growth to challenge any stop-frame clip of a rose unfurling. Unfortunately, the growth has invited lots of pests into the garden, decimating some of the plants that I’d dutifully hardened off and replanted in their growing patch. Boom!
It was all going so well! I’d planted out the courgettes that had been so enthusiastic in the greenhouse; the nasturtiums were growing with a whistle and a song; and the purple-sprouting broccoli and Romaine cauliflower were all sitting politely in their rows, basking in the heat, gratefully accepting water and dutifully growing into adult plants, starting their slow journey from plant into seed.
Then I went to the Glastonbury festival. We had an amazing time, having experienced the best weather the festival has seen this century. A hot, dry Glasto is to be savoured and savour it we certainly did. The first day was the hottest on record since the long, hot summer of 76. People were flaking out, and the entire festival sought shelter under the trees.
What perfect conditions for my plants, I thought.
On return, I was faced with a tumble-weed of dusty silence - skeletal nasturtiums embarrassed by their nudity; brocolli and cauliflower transformed from former athletic abundance to waif-like shadow – about as healthy as a crack-whore after a big weekend’s binging. They’d been well watered. They’d been treated to the sun. It seems that a hostile hunger had been somewhat premature in the placing of the plant onto the dinner plate.
I laid out slug repellant, expecting that to do the trick, but over night, the remaining green had diminished more deeply, leaving the whispered screams of a veg patch in peril and safely under attack.
I eventually found the culprit!

Gutted! Slugs I can deal with. But a caterpillar! I didn’t want to have to “remove” a caterpillar. They grow into such majestic beasts.
Eventually, and after over a week chomping away on my crops, the many-legged critter finally wrapped itself up in its metamorphic sleeping bag and drifted off to sleep.
I’d love to finish this tale of woe with a positive affirmation about the transformational nature of waiting, embedding a metaphoric parallel between the butterfly with a satiated hunger emerging from its chrysalis, fluttering off to pollinate my tomato plants, and thus giving back what it had taken.
But, alas, I don’t know what happened to the chrysalis because some days later it had disappeared. I hope it hadn’t been eaten by our cats…

But there is something positive to glean from all this.
I managed to salvage the nasturtiums and they’re growing back, wounded but surviving and returning to full growth. I’d planted some extra purple-sprouting broccoli plants to cover myself in lieu of this very situation. And, amazingly, the courgettes had escaped the hungry maw of the soon-to-transform caterpillar.
So, I suppose there is a happy moral to conclude this tale of June / July pottering. Life recovers. And I do like to think that the butterfly really did pollinate the tomatoes and the courgettes - now growing faster than we can possibly eat them. So, if karma could ever have had a better illustration, I’m not sure I could find it.
