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Its cold for May 18th. Whichever direction the wind blows from the air is cool. The rain has cooled the soil and we are two weeks behind in the garden, Even the bracken on the hillside barely wants to grow. Yet there is the occasional moment in the day when the wind drops and the stillness descends. Then you can hear the growth. It makes a noise, faintly audible, like a crackling and a fizzing, its the noise of nature growing, the unstoppable force of spring unfolding. Its the noise of magic.

The other thing about rain is that it cools soil. It can be a lovely warm day with sunshine but a night of rain and soil temperatures will plummet….which is unhelpful at this time of year when I want warm, damp, fluffy soil in which seeds germinate quickly. We are at field capacity now so gardening is off. I have retired to the tunnel to tie up the sweet peas.

And with this rainfall come the slugs and snails. Its why a dry spring is so much more preferable as I have always screamed about in Hortus or The Edible garden or The Telegraph or whatever publication I have contributed too down the years, as if I could order a dry spring up just like that. Now, every night after dark I go out through the vegetable gardens, with the torch, and up to the poly tunnel. One by one I pick the slugs off and fire them over the chicken run and into oblivion. Some get squashed underfoot.

At the moment they are trying their best to kill off my half dozen calabrese plants that are in the tunnel but they are growing too strongly and the growing tips have got away, thank goodness. They love the flowers that have been grown from seed too and have played merry hell with the cleome in their modules. That was a rogue, over-wintering snail that I found lurking under the carry trays.

Because the farm is certified biodynamic and organic, I could use the slug nematode as a biological control as it is permitted, but somehow I haven’t the heart. A total purge of any given organism is not what nature intended, and even holding that intention is low frequency. The slimy ones are there for a reason like everything else. Saying that, having used the nematode in the past it does reduce the breeding population considerably and could never do anything other than scratch the surface. Incidentally, back then it was particularly successful with the keeled slug that lives in the soil.

There is no end to this warm/wet spell in sight so there will be more of this….

More rain over night. Why is the weather so uppermost in my mind always when it comes to gardening? The answer is that we grow what we can grow in this green and pleasant land of ours because of four inches of topsoil and…..rainfall.

We have been planting the hardy annuals today. Rain is now falling outside to give them a good watering in. Its cold though, too cold for May, and rain cools the soil too.  The grass will not grow, the cows eat it as fast as it appears. Whats more – the slugs are awake so the garden is vulnerable. Anyway, in have gone sweet peas, Sunflower ‘Claret’, Cosmos ‘Seashells’, plenty of nasturtiums and some lupins. Cerinthe too, Melanie’s favourite. There are some named varieties now. Grumbles aside it is spring with all the miracles of birth and growth that this extraordinary season brings. I heard a cuckoo last week (up in Staffordshire) and my most favourite song of all is the sweet warble of the blackcap. All day long he sings – where does a little person get so much energy from?

The dry spell of two weeks ago meant that we could make hay. Now thankfully they give rain, its too late but we’ll take it anyway. The ground is like a rock and what we need is a fortnight of non-stop steady stuff. Then perhaps the grass might grow a bit.