Broad Bean Disaster! Quel Horreur!

Totally pissed off to discover my broad beans have something awfully wrong with them but no idea what.  The symptoms are that they haven't grown very tall, the leaves are kind of tightly packed and the flowers are going completely black from the bottom of the plant, there are chunks missing out of the leaves and they've got no bloody beans on them.

 As if that wasn't disappointing enough...

...this is the compost heap where I planted six pumpkin plants a week ago.  Gone.  Decimated by bastard slugs. 

Ah well, at least the courgettes are doing well with baby courgettes already appearing on them, and the remaining pumpkin plants and French beans have survived, if not grown much.

Tonight I focused on weeding my onions, beetroot and swede.  I was again reminded of what a total amateur I am.  The onions were a real pain to weed since I'd planted them too close together and it was hard enough wiggling my hands in among them let alone getting a tool in there.  Next year I will not make that particular mistake.

A long fiddly job which will need doing again several times, but satisfying to see earth between the plants at last.

Was mighty grateful to my fab son Oscar who turned up with a radio and a chilled can of Strongbow, and after a refreshing break I got on with my work tittering to Ed Rearden's Week on Radio 4.

My cabbage plants were long overdue planting and I'd already dug a patch for them and fed it with garden compost and manure, so I got them in at last.  I'm really hoping the white butterflies have finished laying eggs so they don't get destroyed by caterpillars.  I wish I had a net to cover them with.  I also hope and pray that this area is now free from club root, or that these cabbages are as club-root resistant as they are supposed to be.

The tunnel
Everything is fab in the tunnel.  The sweetcorn is starting to look very impressive, and the carrots are continuing to provide occasional thinnings, although I am about ready to leave them to grow into whoppers now.  I also really want to get another row sown somewhere, but the tunnel is just about full.

The leaves are providing at least three households with as much fresh salad as they can eat, and the spinach is still being thrown into nearly everything I cook.  Again, I really want to get some more rows on the go, but have no space.

I've left a couple of self-set sunflowers in the tunnel for peas to grow up, but all the others I've replanted outside for a late summer display of golden lovliness.

The lady who keeps it all alive... the fantastic Mrs H, who runs away if I point a camera in her direction, but without her tireless watering duties, it would all be dead, so I sneak the odd shot of her because she so deserves to appear in this blog.