After the cold spring and the glorious June, July has decided to keep us on our toes. Slugs, whose numbers were knocked back severely by the winter weather, have had time to breed and are coming at the salad greens from all directions. Rain in buckets and sunshine alternate minute by minute. Courgettes burgeon one moment and are washed out of the ground the next. It really keeps us on our toes. But the slugs are most obliging about lurking under the pieces of timber or stone we put out of them, so a quick walk around with a bucket in the morning and we can sweep them up and escort them off the premises, and the aforementioned courgettes are producing fit to beat the band. Courgette cake, courgette bread, courgette pizza dough, courgette chutney – the flavour is great when you use organic veg. Oops! forgot to mention the quiche. Its lovely having all the fresh veg for the cafe. Our seasonal salads not only have the usual lettuce, baby spinach, rocket etc but wild greens like chickweed and fat hen and lots of flowers. There’s another potato blight warning today and even if wanted to we couldn’t use a copper spray in the rain – it would wash straight off. Fortunately the haulm has already died off on the early Premier – indeed most of them are dug and sold, and our early maincrop Sarpo Axona is blight resistant and a delight to grow. While some people don’t like the slightly later Sarpo Mira we haven’t found anyone who doesn’t love the floury texture and earthy taste of Axona. And just at the moment the flowers are beautiful and sweetly scented above its lush, healthy foliage.

The weather suits the summer berries as well. The crop this year is almost breaking the branches. We’ll have plenty to sell fresh and to use for jam making through the winter and summer pudding will be on the cafe menu for quite a while to come. The gooseberries are particularly delicious this year – if you’ve never eaten the ripe berries you should – I’d rather have them than grapes any day and all the garden staff are gooseberry converts. At home the wasps have decided to nest under a blackcurrant bush this year, very close to the house door. We will leave them where they are because they eat so many aphids. The nest will be in a completely different place next year – they never nest twice in the same place. We’ve cut the branches from the bush just over the nest and picked the fruit indoors. Blackcurrants fruit on new wood and there is still time for them to make and ripen more wood to carry fruit next year.