The Community Garden is a feast for the eyes at the moment as well as for the body. Our mild, damp June with its long hours of daylight has certainly made things grow. Broad beans, broccoli, cabbage, greens of all sorts and early beets are there for the harvesting and they all taste delicious. Try young broad beans simmered for 8 minutes with a few savory leaves for a really tasty dish. But with all the bounty, comes a few problems:

Strawberries are ripening up fast and they need to be picked every second day. With the damp weather, the berries are going to develop mould quickly and pass it onto any berry they touch. Remove any rotted berries into the compost. I find if I pick them slightly under ripe and leave them overnight on the kitchen counter they are bursting with flavour the following morning when they go onto the breakfast cereal, are frozen or get made into jam.

All the brassicas (broccoli, cabbage, etc) are growing well but so are the caterpillars on them. There are a lot of cabbage white butterflies around and they have laid their eggs(1mm white elongated eggs) on the underside of the brassica leaves. Holes in the leaves and small round heaps of green feces mean they are munching your leaves and growing plump. To avoid coming face to face with a caterpillar as you eat your broccoli, cover the plants with remay. If it is too late for that, make sure you soak the plant in cold water with a tablespoonful of table salt added. Rinse out carefully. They may add extra protein to the meal, but I would rather do without them. Soak any greens in salt water as well if you suspect slugs may be present.

On the topic of brassicas, I had an unwelcome surprise when I pulled up a couple of cabbage plants that had over-wintered. They had club root. It was the first year for any brassica in that part of the plot and I was surprised to find it. If you pull one up and it has sizeable solid knots on the roots, you have club root and it is very bad news. It thrives in acid soil and I suspect it was in the soil before we tilled it. The only thing to do is avoid planting brassicas in the same place each year and lime heavily. They say if you don’t grow brassicas in the area for 4 – 7 years and lime well, you can get rid of it or keep it at a low level. What you must not do is compost the plant in the communal compost pile. This will spread it throughout the garden. Take the plants home and burn them.

Slugs are active again. You can drown them in a saucer of beer or in a plastic dish with a mixture of sugar, yeast and water in it. It is the smell of the fermentation that apparently attracts them. Sink the dish so the lip is level with the soil. Pieces of a copper pan scrubber teased out and laid around an area will also deter them. Apparently they get a small electric shock when they crawl over it. My preferred method is two large stones if I can find the slugs. I also encourage grass snakes by making rock piles for them to over-winter in. They also love to get under some black plastic to warm up. A great friend of the gardener.

It is time to start your winter vegetables and those which will over-winter to give you a spring treat. Check the planting schedule inside the shed. At least we don’t have the pests to deal with in the winter months and I have a feeling this coming winter will be a bit milder than the last.