Oh! Mr Putin, what shall I do?

I spoke too soon. My humongous Red Russian tomato has come under attack from slugs and has had to be pulled off before fully reddening. Luckily, there was still a fair bit left after I cut out the damaged parts. But it's only fit for cooking now.

I actually caught one of the blighters at it the other evening and am now mounting a nightly guard on the others tomatoes, although it's true to say you have to go to bed sometime. I hope the next-door neighbours don't think I'm shining a torch at their bedroom.

My mate Steve says the Gloria Greenfingers instructional strip I came across in a 1950s Empire News contains advice that is all wrong. I have discovered that the newspaper went out of business in 1960 - serves them right.

Pause for reflection

As a journalist, my stock in trade was anniversaries. A year, five years, 10 years, 50 years, a century, it was all grist to the mill. Whatever the time span, it was a chance to bash out couple of hundred words of retrospective magic in the continuing battle to fill acres of space in the newspaper.

So I am pleased to note today that it is is 13 months and five days since my first blog about starting a vegetable garden. It just shows how far I have strayed from the journalistic frame of mind that the actual one-year anniversary went by without me realising.

Lessons I've learned since I began this enterprise are to get my soil in much, much better condition for next year, pack plants a lot more closely together in the ground and plan ahead on replacements once one sort of veg is exhausted.

What I have gained from it all, in addition to food for the table, is pleasure, a nice sense of calmness when I'm fettling outside and an interest I never really had before in gardens we visit.

Bring on the next 13 months and five days.

Our healthy diet

The crops are coming in and we are living on a diet of tomatoes and beans (green, not baked).

The Cherokee Trail of Tears beans which have so intrigued me, pictured above, are now cropping handsomely and tasting very good. To my mind they are better than the runner beans. And to think that I once had grave doubts about them.

I've also dug up the garlic at long last and put it to dry. Some bulbs grew, some didn't. Who knows why?

I'm also getting a healthy amount of tomatoes - the Outdoor Girl first off the mark, followed by the Gartenperle and now one or two of the Bonny Best. Sadly, I have found that something has nibbled at three of the tomatoes I have picked over the last few days or so.

Nothing of the Red Russian tomatoes yet, although the biggest of them all is getting redder by the day. Now that would be a real shame if something got to that before me.

Doubts are cast upon me

I've recently been wrestling with the problem of gender and gardening after coming across the above cartoon strip in an issue of the Empire News of the 1950s.

Leafing through a book about Austria (Monk Gibbon, Batsford, 1962)at about the same time, I was surprised to come across the following passage:

A lad must not interfere with the vegetable-garden. He may do the digging but not the planting and picking. If he does, he runs the risk of being called Madl-Bua (of which lassy-lad is the nearest translation).

I suppose I could take the slur personally, but I've had a little reflection about it and it seems to me that we in Britain have had a long tradition of either sex happily tending to vegetable plots. Do they still think the same in Austria as they did 40 or 50 years ago, I wonder.

My tomatoes go down a treat

It was a genuinely thrilling moment when I picked and ate my first two tomatoes. I must have had a face like a little boy who had just been given a train set.

It's tempting to say they were the best tomatoes I have ever tasted, but I'll restrict myself to the comment that they seemed pretty good to me. I had pondered how to have them, wanting to savour the little beauties at their best. Karen Meyers, who runs an interesting gardening website from her home in the USA has had a recent posting suggesting three easy ways to serve tomatoes, but it seems to me they refer to the whoppers they favour on the other side of the Atlantic rather than the much smaller types such as Outdoor Girl. In the end I had one on its own and the other in a salad sandwich with lettuce from the garden and a hard-boiled egg. Lovely. I notice that some of my Gartenperle tomatoes are starting to redden. Will be interesting to compare the taste with the others.

I've been out and about foraging down our lane this afternoon, picking such blackberries as are ready. Not a great lot yet, but I gathered a decent amount to do something with.

It turned out to be a more profitable little outing than I thought, as a neighbour passed by and offered me some of his daughter's apples to go with them. Should make a nice pie or crumble.

Code alert red

The Observer Organic Allotment Blog asked a few days ago how everyone's tomatoes were doing and I had to answer then that mine were still green, although getting bigger and bigger. A momentous occasion has arrived since then - one of my Outdoor Girl tomatoes has turned red (and, since I took the photo, another is turning). Wonder what they are going to taste like and how should I serve them? We live in exciting times. No sign of any redness yet on the three other varieties of tomato I have.

I have also cropped a second courgette. Funny how I saw no sign of it the night before, yet there it was all grown next day. Can't appear that fast, can it?

I'm still waiting

The latest posting on the Observer Organic Allotment Blog wonders how visitors are doing with their tomatoes. Are they reddening and ripening, the writer asks.

The answer in my case is that they are getting bigger, but are still very green. One of the Red Russian variety is getting on to the size of Russia itself, as you can see in the photo. It should keep us going for a good few meals when it's ready to pick. Note the use of the word when, not if.

Caution, trip hazard

If only there had been a warning sign - or I was a bit more aware of the space around me. My big toe is battered and bruised after a garden accident.

Taking the garden waste to the car for a trip to the tip, I swerved to avoid a towel on the washing line and walked straight into a pile of paving slabs and tiles. Ouch! To compound it, I was wearing sandals at the time. The scene could have earned £250 on You've Been Framed.

Susan has charitably said in the past that my accidents might be the result of being left-handed. I have to view it honestly and admit I am just a clumsy person.

Ow, ow, ow!

Silence is golden

I've picked my first harvest of runner beans - all seven of them. Another three have been picked since the photo was taken. According to the literature, they will grow in abundance from now on and the problem will be that I will have too many. We'll see.

Whatever the number, I'm pleased with what I've grown and look forward to the long-awaited Cherokee Trail of Tears doing something. There are flowers there, so I'm hopeful.

Where we live we are usually surrounded by noise of some kind, whether emergency vehicles, the factory over the main road, the stone yard across the field or the neighbour who has his motor mower out for hours each afternoon. But as I worked in the garden this morning it was unusually still and noiseless, just one bird flapping about in one of the garden bushes.

It was a rare moment of perfect peace.

Something troubles me

Intermittent rain for most of the day today reminds me of a troubling problem - slugs and snails. My lettuce has been severely mauled and the spinach slightly less so.

I have previously mused about what to do to repel these pests, rejecting the idea of nematodes (equivalent of introducing the rabbit to England, it seems to me) and Susan is firmly of the view I should not use slug pellets. They poison birds, she says, and I have since read that they do for hedgehogs too.

Other solutions such as digging trenches of beer seem a bit drastic, not to say expensive. What is a man to do?

We take a trip out

To Calke Abbey, a National Trust property in south Derbyshire. The policy here has been to retain the house as it was when handed over to the National Trust in 1986, as an example of the decline of the great country house. The result is a mixture of rooms in their finery, those that had seen better days and whole areas that had been simply abandoned. The mixture holds more fascination than the succession of highly restored and stylish interiors the visitor usually gets to see in great houses.

The walled gardens are some distance from the house as the family didn't like to see servants around. A huge kitchen garden big enough to have fed half of Derbyshire lies abandoned, but in the rest of the gardens the National Trust has gone to great efforts to produce a living, colourful and vibrant few acres of land. There are all sorts of vegetables and fruit trees here and we had a few plums which had fallen to the ground. Perfection. Exquisite taste.

Hard to say if I learned anything, but the beds full of vegetables definitely got me thinking I should plan ahead with my planting. I have areas where the current crops have finished (or are coming to the end)and nothing to put in them. If I'd had any sense I would have sown seeds in pots some time ago, ready to plant out when space became vacant. Next year I'll know.

We saw my favourite kind of sign on the plant stalls outside the shop, 'Buy one, get one free', and came away with a pot of fennel and one of purple sage. Susan says we ought to start a small herb garden in the area next to our thriving parsley. I of course have subsequently read up on ornamental, formal herb gardens laid out in elaborate patterns.

One step at a time, I remind myself, as I come back to earth.

First courgette of 2009

Well, I've picked my first courgette of the year and I feel like a proud, over-age parent. It looks a very healthy specimen and we're hoping the taste lives up to the promise. Perhaps it will go in a curry tonight with some of the spinach from the garden. Fingers crossed that there will be more courgettes.

There are also one or two runner beans ready to pluck before they get any bigger and nice green tomatoes are emerging in the conservatory. I shall have to do my best to nurture them during this critical stage in their growth.

When I look back to starting this enterprise, almost a year ago now, it is amazing to see something that I have grown actually reaching the table.

Glory be!

Some tomatoes have appeared at long last on the Tomato Gartenperle plants I have grown from seed.

I have had a few for some time on the Bonny Best and Outdoor Girl plants I bought from the nursery (none yet on the Red Russian, though), but these are the first on something I have grown from seed. Let's hope they progress into the full-blown thing and don't stay green.

It's a satisfying feeling to have come this far.

A trip out

A visit to the Royal Horticultural Society gardens at Harlow Carr, near Harrogate, brings both inspiration and envy. Harlow Carr is a lovely site and it was beautiful weather when we went, one of the few days when it hasn't rained recently.

I'd not been before, so a two-for-one voucher in the Yorkshire Post provides an opportunity to see the site and well worth it too. The leisure industry seems to have run away with its pricing in recent years and we only seem to visit anywhere these days if it's free or discounted price.

Although the emphasis on Harlow Carr is probably more on flowers, there were some vegetable patches too and I particularly liked the mid-Victorian garden and the kitchen garden. An array of different coloured lettuces was particularly impressive.

One thing I noticed was that their vegetables were more closely planted than recommended in the books I have read. It didn't seem to harm them and I will probably not be so generous about space in future.

I have one vacant patch at the moment, having dug up the last of the potato plants this morning. The spuds have been very tasty, but not as numerous as I had hoped. It is also a mystery to me that the plants never flowered.

My friend Kate urges me to try spinach beet in the vacated space and I did buy some of these seeds while at Harlow Carr. Steve says that whatever I do I should never leave ground empty! Put another crop in, he says, suggesting some extra runners, French beans, salads or a green manure. I'll think on about this.

Spudulike

Here they are - eight of what I hope will become a bumper crop of Arran Pilot potatoes. I boiled them and we ate them with a spinach, red pepper and onion tart I conjured up, the spinach coming from the garden. A salad which included some lettuce from the garden accompanied. Simple but effective.

Actually, I'm still not sure what's going on with the spuds. They have yet to flower and the eight potatoes I harvested for tea were from three plants I lifted to see what their state was. A grand total of eight spuds didn't seem a big haul to me so will leave the remaining plants for a bit until something happens or curiosity gets the better of me.

It's been another day of showers, which I suppose saves me the trouble of watering the garden but also prevents me getting outside much. Even so, I managed an hour this morning before the rain came on really heavily. Weeding and pottering about was very satisfying, I found.

While thinking of a headline for this posting, I thought of the Spudulike chain and had to go and look up the spelling. I'm now the proud possessor the fact that the firm was once owned by the British School of Motoring. Business and the decisions it arrives at baffles me.

All things considered, not so bad

We're back from a week's holiday on the island of Anglesey, where it has been uncommonly hot. Along with the rest of the country, we fried. It was all a bit too much for our poor old dog Dolly. She really struggled and spent a lot of time asleep.

Thoughts turned, naturally, to the veg patch back home and how it was faring under the wilting heat. Susan warned me not to be too disappointed if some things had gone disastrously wrong because of lack of watering in my absence.

So there was a mounting sense of anticipation tinged with trepidation as we returned home. As it happens, to quote Jimmy Savile, things were not too bad. In fact, surprisingly good.

We'd moved the tomatoes out of the conservatory and into the open to catch whatever they could. They'd thrived so much that it proved difficult getting up the front footpath because of the spreading leaves.

It turned out there had been a day of showers prior to our return, giving the crops a well-needed soaking. The Cherokee Trail of Tears beans, about which I had been so worried, are now halfway up the pole and there are even signs of life in the one I had written off as dead.

Some of the runner beans have gone beyond the height of the pole (what happens then?) and there's a good bit of spinach and lettuce waiting to be harvested. In fact, we're having some of the spinach in a curry tonight. I like to think it will be the finest curry we have ever had, all because of my fresh produce from the garden.

The one thing I am really concerned about right now is the potatoes. They have still not flowered and some are looking distinctly blighted, ie leaves looking not too good. I haven't had time to do a proper fettle of the garden today and will have to have a trial lift of the potatoes tomorrow to see what they are doing.

Not bad overall. The veg don't seem to need me to be around.

Stubborn beans

The Observer Organic Allotment Blog arrives and with it a photograph of their thriving Cherokee Trail of Tears.

Not only is the photograph better than any I take, but also their beans are way ahead of mine. They are racing up the pole, while I have had cause to lament that mine remain stubbornly tiny, perhaps not more than six inches in height. But there is hope as they have put on a bit of a growing spurt since I began to moan out loud a couple of days ago.

Talk about them and they reform their act, it seems. I hope.

Bringing the crops home

I can't believe it. I've picked some of my spinach and had a raspberry from the garden. That's the raspberry.

Dorothy used the spinach in fishcakes she made us for tea, also some of the chives given to me by my friend Alex 'Pip' Paton. Jolly nice meal.

I remain optimistic

Managed an inspection and a quick session with the hoe in the garden between showers today.

Really excited that little red buds have appeared on two of the runner beans. But, as I suspected, Susan has confirmed my fears that one of the others has become a victim of the slugs and died off.

Still no sign of flowers on the potatoes, a fortnight after they appeared on the ones I gave my friend Kate. They do appear to be growing, all the same, so there's hope yet.

Progress & setback

It has rained at last here and I have had a bit of break from dashing backwards and forwards from the kitchen to water the garden. I don't really mind the trips as I find it strangely relaxing and therapeutic once I get in the rhythm.

Something has destroyed one strong of runner beans. Slugs, I guess. The good news is that the others are climbing well. Fascinating to see how they have curled round the poles all by themselves.

My mate Steve contacts me to say he has lifted their garlic. I must admit I have not looked up the literature to see when this should be done, but Steve tells me the time is when rust is covering the leaves and any green foliage is yellowing. Without going outside to look, I think mine must be near that stage. If that's so, it will be nice to have crops at last. My first.