August was a great month in the plot, everything was growing strongly and we were able to start eating freshly picked vegetables.  Top of the charts were the 6 courgette plants which were competing amongst themselves as to who could produce the most fruits.  Each weekend we would pick the plants dry, seemingly only to find twice the amount the following week.  Despite having grilled courgettes twice a day, and exhausting our repertoire of courgette based recipes we couldn't keep up with the powerhouses!

Peas and mange tout were the other firm favourites.  Freshly picked they were sweeter than those available in the shops and were tender enough to be eaten raw.  Fantastic.  The runner beans had exploded into growth and had already flowered and reached the tops of their stakes, but for some reason they never developed any beans. Strange. The carrot crop was struggling with the clay soil, and despite not having manured their beds, were forking all over the place. Picked young they were quite tasty, but I wouldn't be entering them into any competitions.  Most of the sunflowers on the other hand were now taller than me. It was also time to start thinking about general weed control, as the paths between the raised beds were rapidly being colonized by weeds.  Brute force was the first avenue I tried, courtesy of a B&Q petrol strimmer, a big heavy, noisy brute that decimated everything it came into contact with, and generously covering my lower body in the

process with a fine spray of nondescript green gunk.  After an hour I proudly surveyed my trail of destruction.  After a fortnight the weeds had returned to their original height and were looking more healthy than before, no doubt due to their shredded predecessors that had fertilized the ground where they fell.

A more long term solution than strimming seemed necessary, so I looked to my neighbours' plots to see how they tackled it.  They seemed to fall into four general categories - stoners (paving slabs as their main paths), lawn fans (grass pathways), chippers (wood bark) and bare earthers (into which category I fell).  I had far too much plot to pave, and was too lazy to spend each week mowing grass paths, so the choice was easy, I only had to find sufficient quanties of wood chips to do the job.  Fortunately we'd recently had the trees in our garden trimmed by an arborist, who was charged £50 every time they emptied their skip at the local landfill, and so only too happy to drop a couple of loads off just outside my gate.  I invested in a hundred metres or so of weed supressing membrane - which allows water to pass through it's weave, but which weeds can't penetrate, and put an inch layer of chippings on top.  No more weeds!