Just in time

I planted some tomato seeds in pots indoors and started hardening them off by putting them out every day and bringing them back in at dusk.

Then one evening I forgot them and it rained and around ten pm, I found the poor things were under attack by every slug and snail in the district. It took me a good ten minutes and a lot of 'eeeuws' and 'yucks' to pull the slugs off the leaves and find the hidden snails lurking in the soil and hurl them into the privet hedge but eventually I got my poor chomped and nibbled babies safely back indoors.

Mr G had gone to bed so I left him a note with some cartoon slugs on with speech bubbles saying things like, 'Meanie' and 'Where's my dinner gone?' Next morning, on the dresser next to the plants, I found a piece of paper. On it was a snail, firmly attached, and the words, 'You missed me. Yum yum'. Mr G had spotted it when he got up, merrily munching a leaf. (The snail, not Mr G to whom any kind of green foodstuff is anathema and causes him to make the sort of sign of the cross people use to ward off vampires.)

As it has rained almost every day since then, the plants have stayed indoors. But today Mr G pointed out that they were getting leggy and I should plant them out now. He was quite right. When I tried getting them out of their pots, the poor things were all root-bound and stuck tight. I could almost hear their screams as I wrenched them out. But I hope they sighed in relief as I eased them into their nice roomy growing bags which are up on the trestle table Mr B built for last year's crop. I have wound copper slug tape round the legs of the table, to keep the raiders off. Though last year I had problems with cabbage white butterflies laying eggs on the plants.

I had six plants last year, all different. This year I have ten (it would have been twelve but I gave two of my babies away to a friend of Mr G's), but I think they are all the same variety - and I don't know what they are as the seeds were given away free in the Lakeland catalogue. I shall wait and see, anticipating salads to come. As the snail said, 'Yum, yum'.