Pontins and slug orgies

We have both recently come back from our holidays…. A group of us went to Pontins …. Being away from our allotment made us feel adrift and a little bit pukey….

After spending a week in Pontins we were absolutely gasping to stick our hands in the ‘durt’ and touch something that didn’t feel cheap, vulgar and nasty. It was very noisy and there were too many random objects which beeped or flashed at you without provocation or warning…..

Beener has just asked me to add this free-word association which has just tumbled out of her- dirty wartime cell blocks, smelly, cheesy entertainment, lots of drunks, crap.

No fresh vegetables on site or within a radius of ten miles….

Goin round and round in our heads ‘I am a cheeky girl; Shut up – just shut up, shut up; pump it louder and reach for the stars’ – For god sake Pontins’ put a different compilation mini disc on – damn you….. ‘

Most unsettling…

But ‘each to their own’ and Keener did get pulled up to do a dance competiton by a cruel blue coat and came second – begrudgingly showing the crowd some of her unique moves… – so the holiday wasn’t without humour…

The children thoroughly enjoyed themselves – it was the adults in our group with the dead look in their eyes….

So if you want to book a Pontins break you can find your own flipping link….

Upon return to the plot as you might expect everything had gotten a whole lot bigger. Sadly some sort of slug orgy had resulted in 50 lettuce casualties. A solitary lettuce remaining – shunned by those fat, slimey, ugly, hedonistic molluscs. But why? – those beasts are insatiable! So we will let the lettuce go to seed and save them to sow next year. When we are ready to go into mass commercial production of our miraculous lettuce we’ll let you know!

We continue to abstain from slug pellets. The egg shells are putting up a good fight, but some slugs prevail and our drenched plot is a perfect habitat for them…. But we feel strong in tackling our addiction – we have not dropped a single pellet in anger… Oyster shells, hair (any species or colour), beer traps, sharp grit, ash, copper rings and so on – plenty of methods left to try… I guess I have overcome my addiction by accepting that you just can’t free the world of slugs and of course you wouldn’t want to as they are part of nature’s rich tapestry of interconnections…

But I still hate them – they make my skin crawl and I think they are greedy…

It felt like home as we wondered around our sanctuary, with the sweet pea scent drifting over the plot (except for when it was chucking it down).. A stint of frantic weeding followed – brambles, bind weed and thistles. No gloves, straight in, this was bare-knuckle weeding…. If you bury down into the earth with your fingers and pull on the stem right at the bottom, our soil allows us to get quite a bit of root out – and you don’t get hurt, much to onlookers disbelief. We will dig out the roots of the weeds that dare to survive in the autumn – when we have time!

I then decided that I had had enough of the overgrown paths ruining the look of our plot. So I used hand shears to clear the paths – on my hands and knees the good old fashioned way – as I chopped up and slashed the Pontins experience out of my head.

And then a bit of kicking back and relaxing, grabbing any miniscule drop of sunshine we can….

We have been feasting and gorging since we got back – runner beans, swiss chard, broad beans, potatoes, dwarf french beans, backcurrant (alright – from the hedgerows), mange tout, cabbage, courgette, brocolli, onions and garlic…

So all in all things continue to go well…..

Keener