Summer's here

By the time June comes, we seem to have been waiting so long for our crops to come through… and then they all creep up on us at once! Almost overnight, pea pods have swollen, courgettes have grown and we’ve found the very first green beans dangling amongst a jungle of leaves and pretty purple flowers. At last, no need to airfreight beans in from Kenya!

Our ripening blackcurrants have also caught us rather by surprise and we've had to rig up some improvised protection to keep the birds off the fruit. We did have canes and a long length of netting, but needed to support it above the bushes somehow. Well, necessity is the mother of invention and every mother has to raid the kids' toybox sometimes, so I 'borrowed' 100 coloured plastic balls, jammed each one on top of a cane beside every blackcurrant bush and draped the netting over the top. Perfect!

I thought they looked like some sort of garish fairground game, but Robert saw an uncanny resemblance to markers along a runway… and hoped the planes coming into Gatwick wouldn't get waylaid. No airfreight here, please!