Brrrr

Here we are nearly into June and it is cold enough for frosts overnight... yet not long ago we were basking in the (almost) too hot sunshine and thinking about how to conserve water for a long hot summer.. then we had days of heavy rain, the water butts refilled to the brim and were used to refill the other spare butts and now we have cooler weather with overnight frosts.

Luckily the plants in the garden are fairly hardy, and those tender beans are in the polytunnel growing happily away and will soon need to be provided with bean poles to grow up; the carrots and onions are blossoming well in the artificial warmth and we hope to be able to thin them out soon and taste some of the produce soon.

This year the californian lilac has flowered, obviously last year it went in too late to produce any flowers and I was wondering if I had made a mistake but no, this year it has come on and I now have these pale blue flowers on a variagated variety of the lilac and opposite that, the dwarf lilac has also flowered and we have the delicate flowers showing themselves; I like this bush as when I brought it, I was told it doesn't need any pruning or other work.. and that suited me down to the ground as I am very much an amateur in the garden.

In the greenhouse, the mesembryanthemum's are now sturdy seedlings as as the pansies and nicotiana's and I look forward to planting them out once the frost danger passes.. though the forecast for the next 10 days doesn't seem to show much improvement.

Slugs ate all my marigolds last year, and I don't want a repeat as I want to make some more of that healing hand cream.. any ideas on how to prevent them without using slug pellets.. I tried beer last year and egg shells but to no avail.. all offers of help appreciated.