I try not to kill anything. I don’t swot flies, I try to not provide ants with ideal nesting sites, and with 4 cats on site, mice don’t tend to make themselves known. I am with Chris Packham on this one - live and let live. Which means that things like aphids can become a real problem. I don’t like to use the word pest, because I suppose in some cases, one person’s pest is another beast’s fodder. Or something.

I suppose the answer to successfully growing vegetables and wildlife planting without using standard pest control is to implement and encourage natural predators. Ok, so this is me passing the buck and getting other wildlife to do my dirty work, but I think it’s the lesser of two evils. It also means that I can put more time into productive vegetable growing and gardening!

I’m a release site for Bedfordshire Wildlife Rescue’s rehabilitated hedgehogs, so naturally the Smallest Smallholding is a hedgehog friendly environment. And guess what - I don’t have a problem with slugs or snails. However, the aphids came out in earnest earlier this month, sucking away on the ivy and Paul’s Himalayan Musk rose, steadily making their way to the greenhouse. Well, in fact, they were in the (unheated) greenhouse until the hard frosts and snow came back. They’d sucked the life out of my chives. So this year I have to really look at ways to discourage them and the other munchy munchers both here at the Smallest Smallholding and down on the allotment.

A solution is to undertake some companion planting to deter unwanted beasties - things like marigolds and basil next to the tomatoes, planting onions and carrots together, bay leaves next to the beans (get away Mr Weevil!) and any alliums near the fruit trees. We also have dill growing here and there, a favourite for the aphid-eating machines that are hoverflies.

Another solution is to wildlife garden to enourage the natural predators such as hedgehogs, hoverflies, ladybirds and lacewings. Supplying them with shelter spots and habitats, as well as food is vital. At the moment we have buddleia coming through - the equivalent of an open bar to a butterfly - lavender and rosemary, cosmos to be planted (flowered through to Novemeber last year), and I imagine a lot of the attractive annuals such the borage, cornflowers and verbena bonariensis will have reseeded themselves this year. But I definitely need to do more.

The birds help - sparrows in particular love to pick the aphids off the orange blossom. And of course the hens are also a great help in this respect too. They go fly catching on warm afternoons, cluck and shriek with delight when they unearth grubs, and love to pick at the really small slugs. Last year I let them have the run of the veg plots, and apart from decimating my lettuces (my mistake for uncovering them) and the odd nip at a carrot top, everything was left in place.

The only solution I haven’t managed to find yet, is how to deter Mr Moth from my damson and plum trees. Not sure if alliums deter moths, and I certainly don’t want to put up any of those indiscriminate sticky traps either.

Thursday was too good an opportunity to miss. Weatherwise I mean. I had a mountain of work to get through before this weekend, yet despite my looming deadline, I found myself loading my tools into the car boot and trundling down to the allotment.

I don’t understand why I put it off. Well, I do actually, it’s the weather. There’s no protecting down at the allotment so I avoid  going on days where it’s windy or drizzling. And there’s been a lot of those recently. But as I sat furiously typing away in the conservatory on Thurs, I looked up at the clear blue skies and thought “sod it!”. And so I did, for a couple of hours.

I resumed the digging, and after about ten minutes my back started hurting and I was horribly bored. I threw down my spade and trudged up to the other as yet untouched end of my plot, armed with my secateurs and hand fork. I was delighted to find what few raspberries are left had started to bud. They’re a bit straggly as I didn’t get a chance to prune them in time, but I’ll leave them be and see what happens. I should have enough at least for some sort of raspberry pudding come summer - maybe a rhubarb (also springing up on my plot) and raspberry crumble, or apple and raspberry pie? We’ll see, definitely something to look forward to.

I managed to clear out some of the top section, taking care not to disturb the shallow roots of the irises that still remain at the end. I think it used to be some sort of flower section. Although I did manage to dig up the mind-boggling selection of gladioli bulbs (or are they corms?) alongside great clumps of jerusalem artichoke tubery things (what an interesting display that must have made!). At least, that’s what I think they are. I’m all too aware of how prolific jerusalem artichokes can be, so I might have a go at planting them in a big tub at home. My aunt has volunteered to take a few off my hands too. I don’t like to see anything go to waste, and I’m always up for growing new things.

I also found a half-sunken pot of Pinks that I’ve brought back home along with the gladi bulbs. We have quite sandy free-draining soil here, so I think the Pinks should do very well here.

In my absence, the Christmas tree that was on the border between mine and my neighbour’s plot has also been cut down, which I’m actually quite sad about. I don’t know why, it just seemed quite happy, growing away there, being a bit rebellious.

Anyhow, as the sun was going down, Mum appeared to have a look at my findings, and what work I’d done. We measured out a path and cut in some borders, and I finished digging over (light and easy work) the top half of the allotment inbetween the border of irises down to the raspberry twigs (I’m at pains to call them bushes, because they’re clearly not that robust).  It doesn’t look like much work, but it’s a start at least. I just couldn’t face anymore bloody digging down the other end.

But by the time I left it started raining again. I don’t think it’s really stopped since. The water butts are full to overflowing and the hens aren’t venturing out from the greenhouse much. And being the wimp I am, looking at the weather forecast I think sadly it’ll be a few days before I get down to my allotment again.

Urgh, well - the kitchen is almost done thank goodness. For the past three days I have been able to actually see what I’m cooking, the dust is all but gone, I’m not hopping and skirting around containers and pots, and all in all, it looks pretty good. I have my kitchen back. YESsss!

I have a little bit of work to finish, and then I’ve got a very long list of things to do at the allotment and Smallest Smallholding, some of which include:

1. Putting the Early Potatoes in the ground

2. Putting in more of my Hercules, Stuttgarter Giant and Red Baron onion sets

3. Putting my tent cloche up and sowing my Gladiator parsnip seeds

4. Getting the rest of the Aquadulce Broadbeans in (better late than never)

5. Sowing my Mussleburgh and Porvite Leeks and Snowball Turnips

6. Collecting up some more loo rolls (last lot got put in the recycling by accident) to sow my Heirloom sweet pea seeds that I collected from the plants last year

7. Sow my Nantes Carrots and Golden Bell Peppers

8. Buy some wood and get Rich to build my greenhouse staging (I’ve done a very scientific diagram for him to follow)

9. Buy some wood and get the compost compartments built

10. Do a big ‘poo run’ and stick on compost.

11. More digging (and back pain, and general boredom)

12. Getting the borders sorted on one side for the flower bed.

13. Buy another passion flower to trail up the trellis to disguise the chicken wire.

14. Some general landscaping in the ‘eating area’.

15. Find pots and sow my millions of herb seeds!

I could go on but I imagine you’re starting to get bored now.

In other news - we took Yoko and Cyn to the vets. Yoko had a check up and it was decided that she’s doing fine as she is, so no need to drain her thus far. I really hope she can make it through the summer, because when she stopped laying over the Winter she shrunk back down to a ‘normal’ size.

Cynthia on the other hand, is still unwell. She tends to go in cycles of being ok for about 3 weeks, then gets a problem with her crop, as well as the lack of egg laying and swelling underneath. So we took her in, and it turns out she has a ‘mass’ inside her, just where the eggs pass down. She did a funny egg a few months ago, and we think it may be another one that’s lodged itself there and it may be ‘walled off’ like an abscess. The vet thought that she was a bit young to have a tumour, but didn’t discount it. She said that problems elsewhere can cause problems with the crop too, which is perhaps why Cyn keeps having this reoccuring sour crop problem. It always seems to clear up with the Nystatin though. So at the moment, she’s having 1ml oral baytril a day (baytril works on contact, so getting it to pass through her system is the best way to attack this ‘mass), and we’re waiting a month to see whether the mass has grown or shrunk. If it’s grown, then there’s the option of an exploratory op, and depending on what that finds, surgery. All of which carry risks of course. But we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

In the meantime, I’m trying to keep her well fed and comfortable. She’s not lethargic as such, just a little bit withdrawn and not gobbling her food. I think the sour crop is returning, so today I’m zipping up to the vet (10 miles away) to get some Avipro and see whether we should start another course of Nystatin or not. Apparently if a hen has a fungal infection, baytril can actually compound the problem so we really need to keep a close eye on her. She’s up and about, she seems happy enough outside so I’m hoping and praying that in a month we’ll not be facing a really difficult decision.

Aside from our hen troubles, we got through Easter fine, had a lovely visit from Rich’s parents, and we’re both now on a healthy eating kick. We have a wedding and my school reunion that I’m organising (am I mad?) in May, and I don’t want to look like a spotty beached whale for either event. Plus, there’s the summer, and being plump during the hot summer is not fun. I’ve got loads of gardening, smallest smallholding and allotmenteering to do, as well as swimming, so hopefully that should get me back in shape. And of course, with my kitchen back (not that it went away as such), I am looking forward to a heck of a lot of baking and cooking, especially with my own home-grown produce.

Just a quicky - budgetary restraints and a severely underfunded local library are preventing me from investing in Sarah Raven’s Cutting Garden book. So I thought I would write a post here in the hope that someone has some fantastic ideas of cut and come again flowers that I can grow. I have already allocated some space for Dahlias, but above and beyond this I’ve failed to do any decent amount of research into this ‘genre’ of gardening. So any suggestions are most welcome!