Hosta shoots emerging from their dormancy…but they’re already showing signs of slug damage.

I have always thought of gardening as being a giant wrestling match between me and nature. Nature wants everything to be wild and I want some modicum of order. I don’t like manicured gardens but equally I don’t want a garden full of nettles or brambles but equally I don’t want a pristine patch that’s not a good home for wild critters, dogs, chickens and humans alike.

In the normal run of things, every so often I get on my grotties and wrestle some of the garden’s worst excesses to the ground and then they spring up again a few weeks later. This year is an exception. There has been no wrestling, mother nature has had a free run and I have let her. She’s making plants and flowers and seeds and these are all feeding the little critters and then the bigger critters are feeding on the little critters and the bigger critters are feeding on them and so it goes on. These shoots are the start of the process – the primary production – the beginning of a food web that we can’t even imagine and most people probably wouldn’t even try. Me though? I think about it all of the time. That’s all, nothing more or less.