Things are gradually getting going again in the London Rd Station Partnership garden. We’ve planted a variety of crops in the edible garden: potatoes (Sarpo Mira), runner beans, climbing beans, courgettes (Defender), chard and cavalo nero. We had some good lettuces – and then they bolted. Our rhubarb is doing well, the feral raspberries are starting to fruit and after initial invasions of aphids, our fruit trees seem to have recovered. Unfortunately our apples and crab apple have still got woolly aphid infestations. It’s a case of rubbing off the strange woolly ‘fluff’ that the aphids produce. There are some good looking apples appearing and lots of pears on our ‘Beurre Hardy’ tree.

We’ve tried to renew the herbs in the herb planters but they are getting pretty solid use – particularly the rosemary, which we’ve had to renew twice this year.

We’ve planted annuals in the tree pits. The far tree pit is looking good with a nasturtium growing up the tree trunk and orange busy lizzies tuning in with pink cosmos. There are what I suspect are nicotiana silvestris – huge white perfumed tobacco plants – coming on at the back.

It’s been a horrible year for growing seeds: warm weather, wet weather, windy weather, cold weather all came at the wrong time. It’s taken until now for quite a few flower seeds to develop, such was the impact of cold rainy weather back in May. We’ve planted the flowers that have survived the onslaught of slugs and snails in the right hand tree pit: there’s a mixture of carnations, lemon cosmos, some tobacco plants and some verbascum. We’ll see what develops.

And we’ve tried to coax all kinds of colourful plants to flourish in the platform planters: lobelia and fuchsia appear to be doing well, all our petunia were devoured by slugs, osteospermum are growing but not flowering so much and quite a few plants were squashed by people sitting on them. Oh dear … we’ll keep trying to fill gaps but it is sad to see plants damaged.

In the shady plot, we’ve tried to renew some of the planting with more purple heuchera (easy to propagate), bergenias (also very easy to propagate) and some apricot foxglove seedlings which – fingers crossed – will bloom next year. There are some purple and pink begonias at the top of the triangle. The shady area has benefitted from all the rain this year but that has brought with it huge invasions of slugs and snails. Ho hum … I keep repeating the mantra: “if your plants aren’t eaten by something, they are not contributing to the ecosystem”. The strong plants – the fatsia japonica and aucuba japonica – are not bothered by snails: they just keep growing …