An indestructable garden pest
Despite its reputation as an arena of miserable failure and strife, there is a certain degree of playfulness to be found in the Grumpy Garden. One of our long-established ‘games’ every summer is seeing who can uncover a monster courgette that has secretly moved off the courgette scale and onto the marrow scale.
There are certain unspecified rules to this game, the first of which is that you cannot wilfully ignore an area of the raised bed, then come back to it a week later and feign surprise that your zucchinis have become zeppelins.
The best time to find these monsters of the deep is after a lot of summer rain when the leaves are spilling out onto the pathways in their bid for more sunlight and the rapid growth makes it difficult to survey the crop without twisting and breaking stalks. Get yourself pre-occupied with other things for three or four days and the courgettes will put on girth quicker than a Sumo wrestler at an all-you-can-eat noodle buffet. At this time of year you have to lift, prod, poke and peer carefully in your bid to get at the ripe courgettes without snapping off anything vital. It’s after you’ve harvested the most likely suspects, content that you won’t have to come out and do this for a while, that some courgettes can chug away quite happily in the depths of the entanglement. And then… there be monsters.
Bucking the trend of the great Indian summer this autumn the courgettes gave up early, frankly exhausted after all they’d done. But then I found this sleeping giant at the end of October…
(trust me, it's a lot bigger than it looks)
Another game involves a pair of hideous waltzing gnomes kindly given to us by my mother-in-law, ‘Hyacinth’. This gruesome couple move peripatetically around the garden, and ‘delight us’ (very much in Pride and Prejudice sense of “thank you, Mary, you have delighted us long enough”) by appearing in bizarre places. A lot of the time they pop out from underneath the rhubarb. We grow this exclusively for Hyacinth so that she can get some practice bending over. It also necessitates that she walk down to the end of the garden every so often, as we have churlishly refused to install a Stannah garden chair lift.
I have to give them this, the waltzing gnomes are survivors. We tried to leave them behind at our last house, but Hyacinth did a last-minute sweep of the premises and found them tucked suspiciously behind an old compost bin, under some plant pots… with a notice strapped round them, ‘Do Not Resuscitate’.
In Spring I like to bury them for a few weeks in the hope that the paint will start flaking off, but whatever substance is covering them would be my firm recommendation for the hulls of nuclear submarines, or maybe even the Forth Rail Bridge. Air rifle pellets seem to have no effect. I’m sure if I left them out on the main road for them to be run over they would take a wheel off a car.
When I was concreting the patio, it did cross my mind that the hardcore I’d assembled was missing a Strictly Come Dancing element and I was sorely tempted. But knowing this wretched couple’s penchant for reappearing, we’d be having a family barbecue some time in the future, there would be a sudden loud scraping sound, and they’d come up through the paving slabs like it was the final scene in Carrie.
