This is our first summer of harvests, late harvests because the time taken to create the Mandala meant that we had to postpone sowing and planting the plants indoors and growing them in the Mandala. The first successes, the first delights, a few failures too, but always the joy of learning and enjoying fruit and vegetables without pesticides or chemical fertilisers. The strawberries, which we were only expecting in year 2, are harvested every day – a real treat. The squash are hard to keep up with and the lettuces are a real forest of ‘Christmas trees’ before their time – they went to seed with the heat while we were turning into rabbits. In any case, the race against the slugs was won this year thanks to our toad friend, whom I slipped under the mulch. He’s enjoying it and we’re sharing it with him!
The ‘mildew’ hit us at the beginning of August after 3 months of great sunshine, which is a shame, but that’s the game. Mushrooms are the masters of the world, let’s face it. The North-West ‘dial’ dedicated to tomatoes was decimated in 48 hours, nothing could be done and a very big surprise: all the plants that we had alternated with cabbages on the other dials were saved. I hadn’t read about this anywhere, so it was a bit of a coincidence as cabbages aren’t very friendly to tomatoes, but they made a ‘wall of fire’ and we’ll still be eating a few tomatoes this summer.
