So, the garden is looking beautiful, and apart from continued lettuce disasters (seriously, we can’t win with that darn plant) and my accidental destruction of a plant (dropped my back protector on it by accident) things appear to be growing well. It is, in fact, beautiful out there.
But there is one thing causing torment. Aphids. We were hoping that ‘natural pest control’ (i.e. bugs and birds eating other bugs) would limit their destruction. Last year they unleashed themselves on a variety of plants an caused them to look rather sad and not fruit well, and so on. This year, we hoped, this would be overcome by the sheer number of birds and buzzythings that hop/fly around the garden. Well, I hoped that. That and just thought it might not be so bad.
We are also much less tolerant of weeds, have removed the Swiss Chard they seemed to delight in living on and have been meaner to the ants*.
But no.
All the fruit bushes and a couple of other plants have succumbed to the Aphid terror. And nothing much that we do really seems to clear them. And so I admit to being a weak human, I’ve sprayed a few of the plants. We’ve got some organic aphid/whitefly killer – which appears to consist of some sort of weak acid with plant lipids around. It says that it’s safe to spray on fruits and won’t hurt other things and all the feeble promises which I assuage some of my guilt with. But seriously, the entire of the blackcurrant, raspberry, gooseberry and other blackcurrant bushes were curled up leaves wrapping aphid egg colonies.
I’m doing my best to be really ‘strict’ about where this stuff goes. And spraying it fairly infrequently, and I’m pleased to see that the bees are buzzing around the other plants quite happily (the Angelica is, apparently, very popular with them and is handily at the other end of the garden). The rest of the garden seems fairly unaffected, and birds and bees and other bugs seem to wander around quite happily.
But I have the guilt about the aphids.
As a side point, we also appear to have something which is munching down on the young-fresh-tender leaves. This is distressing too, but since we don’t know what it is it’s much harder to stop it. What we really need is some empty plastic bottles so we can put little mini greenhouses over the plants until they get big enough to tolerate such damage. Sadly, much of the Purple Sprouting Broccoli that went out (12 plants) has been eaten, as have nearly all of the beetroot, which was going to make for nice tasty salad leaves. I’m beginning to think that salad may not, in fact, be our thing.
In house news, the quotes vary a fair bit – I think everyone’s quoted including doing the dormer – certainly the one person who specified said ‘first list – £X, dormer/loft £Y-Z depending’. The first figure from that person is incredibly low, and I don’t think they read the list very carefully. Not that they need to, this is finger in the air hand-waving-price-guessing, not some accurate quote.
I’ve poked the other two who quoted, because if they’re all saying ‘yeah this includes doing the dormer’ then the house becomes *way* more affordable, and if we *can* do the dormer as well – I’m quite tempted to e-mail the appropriate council and find out whether it’s a ‘planning permission’ or a ‘building regulations permission’ because the latter is much easier to deal with – and would make the house an enormously better buy.
No jobs yet, though. If I’d trained as a doctor there’d be several jobs, and nothing, upsettingly from the Ambulance Service I e-mailed. Anyhow. Hopefully something will come up for Kathryn and I, because we’re both feeling a bit down about it all. The difficulty and complexity of achieving escape velocity to get out of Slough is proving to be fairly demanding.
* Although I can’t help but wonder if they’ve not made a little anty nest somewhere under the gravel.
