Johnny’s organic gardening adventures are the stuff of legend around these parts. Retro Metro has equipped him with a gnawed stub of pencil and an old paper bag, to bring you the authentic cottage garden experience …

The view from here: Unprecedented amounts of rain have made the 2007 season a fast-flowing nightmare.
Him big water.

Ironic, isn’t it, that the year in which I make my first tentative foray into the world of words should become known for all time as ‘the year of the slug’.

I had hoped to bring you lustrous pictures of fat green leaves and bursting pods, nestling together in the heat of a midsummer blaze – but instead I bring you an image of the rampant river Teme, swollen beyond bursting point by weeks of torrential rain. The line of trees in the middle of the lake is the usual course of the River Teme. Above it, to the right, you can just make out some little houses through the mist. Behind the pylon are rapids created by a submerged fence.

So: how to write a gardening column when even the flame weeder has been defeated by the relentless downpour. How? Well, here’s how …

Slug Soup!
Here in the midst of unbridled nature, we fight to wrest our crops from the jaws of a variety of natural enemies. Chief amongst these are the rabbits and the slugs, although ants, woodlice, pigeons, deer, blackbirds, jackdaws and sometimes even sheep do battle with us for the fruits of our labours. Our labours, mark you – not theirs. The cheek of it!

Jeremy Fisher's larder?
No: the fruits of two minutes' picking up
around the plot in the Sodden Summer of 2007.

I bring you a picture of some slugs, grown fat on my brassicas and broad beans. This year has undoubtedly been the year of the slug. Reaching an inch (2.5cm) or more across, and up to four inches (10cm) in length, the principal variety found on our land is a rich toffee brown with a vivid orange border around the suppurating skirt. These monsters have grown horrendously fat, allowed free access to all areas by the relentless dampening of surfaces ordinarily too rough and gritty for our slimy chums to bother with slithering across them.

Last year we were picking Cabbage White caterpillars off the Purple Sprouting Broccoli. This year's brassica crop was devoured in its infancy by a deluge of slugs.

However! The Greenfinger magic remains undimmed. The slugs are so plentiful that they have become this year’s major crop. In the past I’ve experimented with all options for their defeat, and found that beer traps, Slug Shocka copper-impregnated mats and even the fabulous new Advanced Slug Killer pellets from Growing Success are of limited usefulness against the invading hordes.

These pellets are, nonetheless, worthy of note: based on ferrous phosphate, they are the only slug-killing pellets certified for organic use, don’t cause secondary poisoning of hedgehogs or birds – and, even better, they work particularly well when wet. Indeed, when swollen and mouldy, the slugs find them so delectable that frequent reapplication is necessary simply because the little blighters have hoovered them up!

The Slug Stoppa Granules I formerly bought in bulk now languish in the potting shed, since one good soaking renders them useless. The only thing wrong with the Slug Killer pellets as far as I can tell is that the number of customers queuing up for a taste of death makes replenishment a touch expensive.

Given the difficulty of funding such Twenty-first Century indulgences, the one method of eliminating these dastardly little creatures which has worked reliably during this rain-drenched season has been good old fashioned ‘picking them up’. There is no labour involved in this: as I tear out the rambling weeds, there they lie, fat and self-satisfied, and in a moment I have a mountainous handful, looking for all the world like a delicious confectionary treat. Irony there: did you spot it?

I have a big lidded bucket half-filled with water from the butt, and into this I deposit my prey, ensuring that the lid is entirely air-tight, and leaving them for a good few days before removing the lid, drinking deep of the intensely farty fragrance which explodes from the depths as soon as the lid is removed, and tipping the contents over a freshly-crammed compost bin into which I have packed a new crop of nettle tops, thistles, landcress and grass. Yes, I have these in abundance too, this year, thanks to God’s bountiful dousing of these parts.

Within 24 hours the green matter has been reduced to what would ordinarily amount to six months’ worth of cold composting progress. I then resume the torn cardboard and kitchen waste deposits of more normal times, and these too are consumed by the now rampant bacterial population in a trice. The family may be starving during next year’s ‘hungry period’ - when my late lamented baby broccoli and red kale should have been filling us with vits and mins – but my goodness the compost bin will be full of crumbly richness …

English Country Garlic …
My plot lies on a south-facing slope of the glorious Teme Valley, and so I have taken to growing Mediterranean crops with some seriousness. Italian tomato varieties such as Alicante and Roma enjoy the spot, and my young Phoenix vine produces sweet, muscaty white grapes in reliable abundance year upon year. The only problem I’ve had with the vine is in beating the ants to the harvest.

I gave up on trying to dry the crop outside, and hung it on string in an unsuitably moist shed. Then I trudged off to gawp at the AA van bobbing about down the road …

Garlic is another crop which I have become perhaps too serious about. In a hot, dry season such as that of 2003, when leafy crops would shrivel and crisp under the heat of the sun – even when their roots were perfectly moist – the garlic yielded up its wonders with minimal attention and little extra H2O. This year I despaired of gathering anything other than a handful of soggy leaves, but instead pulled head after head of admirable quality and size. Admittedly, my drainage is as good as it could be on a heavy, lumpen clay - I use raised beds, and have added plenty of organic matter to improve the soil – but nonetheless I think the garlic itself may claim some credit for the splendour of this year’s offering.

I buy my seed from Jennifer Birch, a Gloucestershire specialist who offers a splendid variety of cultivars, including organic and non-organic options, and in weights from half-a-pound to growers’ sackfuls. A highly recommended supplier, and her clear and helpful little annual list is certainly an improvement on the one or two varieties (if you’re lucky) offered by more general seedsmen.

I usually choose one long and one short-dormancy variety; this year’s candidates were Arno and Corail. The short-dormancy Corail was by far the most impressive variety I’ve yet tried: it produced the promised huge heads and fat, succulent cloves with an exquisitely fragrant flavour. As soon as the first heads were delivered to the kitchen, Lizzie attacked a couple of cloves with the flat of her knife. So rigid with juice they were that she brought all her weight to bear on the blade before the cussed little beauties consented to collapse, doing so with such a start that Liz almost fell onto the table, and spurts of delicious juice shot right across the room! Oh how we larfed.

In 2004, the Royal Horticultural Society conducted Award of Garden Merit trials on garlic varieties from a number of suppliers. Three of Mrs Birch’s varieties impressed the panel sufficiently to gain the award: the long-dormancy Arno and Christo, and the short-dormancy Germidour. Corail was not trialled at the time, and given that only half of the trialled varieties measured up to the exacting standards of the RHS judges on quality and appearance of the dried bulbs, their keeping qualities, maturity date and freedom from disease, I’d pick this in preference to any comparable type which was tried - and failed - during the experiments of 2003/4.

Garlic can be pulled as soon as the leaves start to turn yellow; slide a finger down the side of a bulb or two to see whether they’re ready for lifting. There’s no need to wait, as with onions, until the leaves have entirely given up the ghost. I put a sheet of galvanised netting on top of a huge terracotta pot, and laid the first crop out, waiting for the sun to dry it out in the customary fashion. Those still in the soggy ground began to look wilting and desperate - yet the first batch still lay there, resolutely claggy after repeated drenchings. I gave up, and bunched both varieties with string, hanging them in an unsuitably moist shed instead. Then I trudged off down the road towards Tenbury Wells to gawp at the AA rescue van left bobbing about in the seven-foot deep river that covered the road. Must remember to watch for mildew. And in the meantime, we can all look forward to discovering what Lizzie does with these horticultural wonders. Once they’ve dried out, that is …

In Johnny Greenfinger 2:
How to build quick, cheap raised beds
– and it's seed-time here in the UK …