Relief that the lockdown vegetable garden is finally growing strong

The garden is finally growing. Despite living in London, where it's warmer than most of the rest of the UK, I'm behind Monty Don in Gardener's World and behind Alan Titchmarsh in Grow Your Own at Home. To be frank though, I'm relieved to have things growing at all, it's been such a difficult year. Lots of seeds didn't germinate at all. I've battled with slugs and snails stripping my plants of leaves and killing many of them, and I've had terrible black fly on my beans. In fact, the one positive side of the the slugs and snails was that they ate a lot of the black fly along with the leaves.

I have the suspicion that part of my problem is lack of access to a garden centre. Although they have reopened now, being a person with underlying health conditions, I'd rather my garden was less than perfect than that I end up a statistic. This has caused trouble in a number of ways. Firstly, I found myself largely relying on the seeds I already had. And some of those, although still in date, simply refused to germinate. This meant I had smaller numbers of plants than normal, so it was all the more important that the ones I did have were a decent size and weren't destroyed. Unfortunately, that frequently didn't go my way, and I had to start again with any seeds I had left or try and buy more where I could. This situation was worsened by not being able to get as much compost as I usually would, so my garden has been less well fertilised, causing problems for some of the plants that did grow. I've also been very worried that the miserable wet weather would give my tomatoes blight.

But now the worst finally seems to be over. My tomatoes have so far survived the rain blight-free, and one of the self-seeded ones that I had to use when I didn't have enough seedlings has even produced its first green tomatoes.

My sweet corn plants are finally growing well, all apart from the two at the shadiest end of the bed (they're so small that unless you look carefully, you won't spot them at all).

My beans finally look like they're going to survive the onslaught of slugs and snails, although it's still possible that not all of them will. While a few of my purple beans have made it to the tops of their poles and even produced beans, 

my runner beans are in a lot more trouble, having lost huge numbers of leaves. Most of the runner beans have considerably fewer leaves now than they did when I planted them, and it's possible that even with regular slug patrols every evening (see previous post), they might not survive.

I don't know what's happened this year. In previous years slugs and snails only ate my beans when they were young, tender seedlings. This year, they're eating any leaf they can get their mouths on. However, on the plus side, the ladybirds have finally arrived, so hopefully they'll deal with the black fly for me.

My squashes, although behind where I'd like them to be, also look like they're now pretty safe from slug attack.

In another plus, the greenhouse is looking healthier than ever. I have achieved this by largely keeping the door and window shut. There's nothing much in there that doesn't enjoy baking hot temperatures, so I've been watering plenty and keeping the heat in and the pests out. I've also got chrysanthemums in there, as they seemed to help prevent infestations last year, although my chrysanthemums are still currently seedlings. 

However, even with only leaving the door open while watering, one of my aubergines near the door has already got greenfly. 

I've dealt with it as best I can by crushing the greenfly between my finger and thumb and spraying with water with a dash of washing-up liquid, but my experience is that once a pest gets in there, that's it, I can never kill them all. Also, today I intentionally left the door open because my peppers have started flowering and I want the bees to pollinate them. I hope the plants are big enough and strong enough now to cope with whatever else flies in there. I've already sprinkled some chicken manure pellets in their pots, as I've noticed the plants' lower leaves going yellow, which means they're short of nitrogen, and chicken manure is a relatively nitrogen-heavy feed.