I’ve probably said before that I will keep doing this work, running the nursery, growing the plants and opening the garden until we have a whole year of perfect gardening weather. This would mean that no records would be broken, we wouldn’t have to endure the hottest, wettest, windiest, coldest days/weeks since records began. This is getting tricky because I’m getting older obviously and realistically there is little chance of my dream coming to fruition in fact I may well have to give up due to my lack of strength and stamina not to mention the arthritis which all make it harder to keep going.

Having to be permanently adaptable to fit the jobs around the heat or the wet is not always easy. It would be nice to be able to plan the week or even a whole day without having to alter my mindset if/when the weather changes. Equally difficult are the long hot dry spells we’ve had when it really is not possible to do much work except the daily round of watering. Gardening is out of the question when the temperatures are over 30 degrees centigrade. The thermometer in the poly tunnel has been as high as 41.6 c so not remotely possible to do any potting or propagation.

Storm Francis on Tuesday made me feel on edge all day. The winds were getting more fierce by the hour. My main worry is whether or not the covers on the tunnels would be damaged. Re-covering a 60 x 24 ft tunnel is not an easy job and requires quite a lot of strength to get the very large sheet of polythene on tight. I’ve lost count of the number of times this largest tunnel has been re-sheeted whereas the other two have only had to have a replacement once. I tried to be pragmatic and say what will be will be. But getting up yesterday morning and seeing that a tear had started above the north facing door almost caused me to have a meltdown. My solution was to escape and abandon ship and go out for the morning and see some friends. And lo! when I got back Philip had done a good job patching it up with lots of sticky tape. With a bit of luck it might last a while longer.

So please, no more storms from across the Atlantic.