The warm July sun put an end to my bed digging, as the ground turned rock hard and I struggled to sink a spade more than an inch into the soil.  Perhaps this was fortunate, as watering duties took up more and more of my time. Dotted around the site were metal water troughs kept topped up with water via a ballcock system, and one of these was just outside my front gate, so getting fresh water was never a problem.  I planned to only water heavily once a week, to encourage the plants to develop deep root systems and to find moisture for themselves.  However most of the time was spent walking to and from the trough, filling up watering cans.  There had to be a more efficient way of doing this.... I tried being more efficient by filling up large containers with water and using a wheelbarrow to move them around the plot.  This way I could fill the watering cans up from the container.  Sounded good, but in practice I pulled so many muscles lifting the containers that I spent the next few days convinced I damaged myself permanently.  My mind wandered to gravity driven irrigation systems, so I built a wooden platform by the front gate, put a dustbin with a tap drilled into the bottom upon it, and fitted a hosepipe.  The dustbin could be filled with water with buckets from the trough easily, and was a good 1.5 meters above ground to provide the pressure.  Again in practice this didn't give a fantastic head of pressure.  I substituted the hosepipe for a soaker hose that could drip feed 4 of the beds which worked well for a couple of weeks.... before the hoses clogged up.  In the end I used the system mainly to top up the pond which lost an inch or so each week to evaporation, and got used to lugging watering cans about. Although it was quite late in the year, I found 10 straggly runner bean seedlings from B&Q that were on sale at the bargain offer of 10p each.  Planted out with no protection they duly got decimated by a grateful wood pigeon population.  Having learnt my lesson, I planted a fresh pack of runner beans, and clad the bamboo canes they were go grow up with an impenetrable layer of enviromesh netting.  Let the bastards get through that! On a more sombre note, nearly all of the potato plants were showing signs of illness - wilting yellow leaves, brown and dry in places.  It wasn't blight, as the brown patches weren't fungal.  That could only mean eelworm, a microscopic nematode that affects potatoes and tomatoes, normally occurring when crop rotation hasn't been practised, and hangs around for 10 years or so.  Nothing for it but to dig up the crop, sow some green manure (Hungarian grazing rye - a type that overwinters well) to occupy the bed and use an eelworm resistant potato variety next year.  As potatoes go they were quite tasty, if a little on the small side...