A crazy summer here, good for growing as long as we can keep watering. It takes one of us several hours each day, with a £5 daily cost of water, for sales of £1400 weekly at the moment.

See more on this in my recent tour video, published 12th August.

The Ups of dry and hot

Slug and snail numbers are at record lows. Although I found six snails wrapped in celery leaves this morning, while harvesting. They will return.

High light levels mean fantastic leaf and fruit quality. Significantly better than we see in rainy summers.

The produce below on 10th August was for The Three Horseshoes pub in Batcombe. Nye who is head chef enjoys the challenge of ever-changing seasonal vegetables.

The Downs of dry and hot

Flea Beetles

These tiny insects have eaten and bred and eaten more, with no interruptions from rain or cooler weather. The damage to brassica plants is formidable, I never saw anything so bad, especially to young seedlings.

A bed of kohlrabi plants, which I dared to transplant eight days ago, when quite small and then covered with a fine mesh, is now almost empty. Devouredwith little stems only, they cannot grow.

It turns out, more than I had realised, that flea beetle larvae live either in soil, or in the stems of brassica plants. This makes almost inevitable. I'm trying a few things now like spraying with vinegar and washing up soap, also a homeopathic remedy, I shall post about that in the next blog.

I even tried vacuuming the flea beetles. There were soon a lot in there, but by the following day there were still thousands on the kale and swede leaves!

Sowing anything direct has been almost impossible, because of drought and these pests, if it's brassicas. I've taken to potting on new brassica plants so that they are larger and tougher when going in the ground. This involves a lot more time and effort, but is currently the only solution that's working.

Hungry badgers

These larger and strong animals are impossible to keep out of the garden. I'm just grateful that they don't often visit because they quickly cause a lot of damage.

At the moment they are finding fewer slugs and worms to eat in the woods and pastures, because the soil is so dry and hard. Many soil inhabitants are sheltering at depth.

So my sweetcorn is more interesting than normal, and you can see how they trash the plants to eat the cobs.

Lettuce root aphids

These often fly in during early August, devouring roots of lettuce which quite suddenly wilt and die, as in the photo.

Most damage is to plants that are already slightly stressed by lacking moisture.

Usually the Batavian lettuce types continue to grow, despite being a little damaged. The Saragossa below was transplanted 6th July from CD trays, at 17 days old. It’s given us three big harvests so far, and I will I hope continue cropping until the end of September.

On Thursday 13th August we had orders for 32 kg / 70 lb pf salad leaves, and fulfilled all those orders, but only just! Endives are now invaluable, since their roots are not eaten by the aphids.

Fortunately the root aphids are not interested in small seedlings. So my last sowing for outdoor lettuce cropping, made on 20th July and recently planted, is looking good, as long as we can keep watering regularly.

Fruiting plants

These are growing and cropping superbly, again providing we water.

Beans

Runner beans have been less generous, and even when sufficiently watered, their fruiting is discouraged by nights being too warm. In a city such as London, it could possibly be worth sowing again now, for cropping in October.

Strawberries

One year ago, I bought some small plants of Mara des Bois strawberries. They were slow to establish last autumn and then gave a small harvest this May and June before going dormant for a month. Now they are in full flow and giving generously of such delicious fruit, one of the best for flavour.

Raspberries have been more of a challenge because they need a lot of moisture to crop well, and do not thrive in extreme heat. We've now had three days over 30°C, topping, 35.8°C/97°F today. That has been cooking some of the raspberries, almost into jam on the plants, even when the roots have access to moisture.

But mostly they are growing strongly and ripening (too) quickly.

Tomatoes

Many of my tomato plants have grown longer stems than usual, reaching the top of both greenhouse and polytunnel before the bottom trusses of fruit are ripe. I undo the string holding plant stems and let it drop a foot or more with the plant dropping as well.

That means either tomatoes need to lie on the ground for a while, or I find something to put the tomatoes on until they start to open. I actually pick beef tomatoes at breaking stage, when they show the first sign of colour.

NEW Course day

There's been much interest in my energy course day on 19th September, in fact there are 18 people on the waiting list, so we decided to offer a new energy course on Saturday 3rd October. I'll be discussing how I increase the difficult-to-measure energy that powers growth of plants, and at the same time gives us energy and well-being.

The pyramid is a new topic for this course. I only conceived the idea of it five months ago, and it was finished just in time to receive some very potbound plants in June. Also it's new soil, no dig with cardboard and compost on top of very strong weeds, especially field bindweed. So I'll be discussing how we control them, together with all the energy practices I find worthwhile.

Learn more in my New Energies for Gardening booklet, while for no dig we offer a deal on my three recent books.