Tomatoes and other garden pests
At no point when I was sowing what must have been over a hundred seeds or pricking out eighty seedlings did I stop to think, "What exactly am I going to do with eighty tomato plants? More to the point, where am I going to put eighty tomato plants?"
This is absolutely not cottagecore. No waxing lyrical about my ancestors: my great grandparents lived impoverished in inner city slums, some of them in basements shared with two other families. No one was tilling the fields. My ancestors were in the factories and the pits for hundreds of years. This is a privilege.
We're now down to fifty-four tomatoes: I gave the bigger ones to a charity plant sale, some to family, and some shrivelled up and died when the greenhouse got to 42° C. Whoops. This doesn't massively improve matters. I've still not got space for nearly sixty. Previous years I've had twenty-five plants max - and I didn't have enough space for them.
My aim was to be self sufficient in onions this year. We'll have to see how that goes. I've not had to buy salad leaves for six weeks or so. I also planted a lot of pak choi and broccoli but it's been warm and it's flowered. Almost no carrots made it. Last year the first sowing of carrots did well but since then they've all gone the way of the slug. New neighbours cut down some lovely old trees which I'm sad about but I can't let myself get too sad or mad - nothing I can do about it.
The garden - in all its shambles, my incompetent efforts to exert any level of control rather than admit I am simply along for the ride and very little of what works (or doesn't) is anything to do with me - is good for me and, I hope, good for the world. The only way not to be driven to distraction, I've found, while still being driven slightly to distraction, is to submit and surrender to the whims of nature.