Now I appreciate this is neither a Damascene revelation, nor a surprise in any way equivalent to, say, the virgin birth. But it’s significant for a gardener who normally has the entire potato crop safely bagged away in the garage by Sep 1st.

This is not because I’m a lazy sod (although I am). It’s because – astoundingly – the potatoes are still growing.

I know. You may have had to read that sentence twice. I know I did as I typed it.

In six years allotmenteering, I have never seen potatoes untouched by blight and growing lustily on September 8th. This is discombobulating.

I guess I just wait until they DO shows signs of giving up, then harvest them. But at this rate, that could be October. And just how the hell do you dry potatoes for storage if you harvest them on a damp, dank October day?

Help! Advice!

I like to think of my plot as productive, not attractive. God knows I’d love the time to visit every day for hoeing, weeding, trimming, edging and chatting with fellow allotmenteers. But I have a time-gobbling job and other interests… so the allotment gets just barely what it needs and not a second more.

Having said that, it is very productive. Certainly yields more veg – in a normal year – than the wife and I could possibly eat on our own.

This year’s plants are smaller and less productive, but very sweet. And in a fit of rare productivity (unreplicated since, I should add) I did three sowings a fortnight apart, so we should have corn from now until the end of September – weather permitting.

In other news: the allotment has turned into a weed nursery. I’ll be working my arse off from now until Christmas getting it back under control.

I’m praying for an autumn of good weather so I can get ahead… but this cool August is looking a little ominous.

In the midst of the July heatwave, I was convinced my cauliflowers were going to die or produce mini-heads. To my own utter astonishment, they’re now starting to head. Er, not lavishly. But still.

So my habitual pessimism has served me poorly this year. Despite everything the weather has thrown at my vegetables, and despite a distinct want of effort on my part, I’ve had no outright crop failures (unless you count a row of carrots so small they looked like those mini toothbrushes you get on long-haul flights).

Here’s to cauliflower cheese tonight!

My allotment, I’m ashamed to admit, has gone a bit weed-tastic in the last few weeks. I’ve not gone much; went away for a while, then was busy trying to run myself back to some kind of fitness.

Plus I’ve had dental problems.

Dear God, but dentistry’s pricey. Could have bought a small family home in Rochdale for what I’ve spent so far on root canal work. And there’s more to come. After a decade of relative calm, every tooth in my head has spontaneously decided to crack, rot, combust or spit the dummy in one way or another.

So there’s been pain, whingeing, allotment neglect and endless, unbounded expense. Back to normal service in the autumn, I guess.

The last flowers of these lilies – an oriental/trumpet cross – always presage the end of summer for me. The final blooms usually drop off at the end of August; they’re early this year because of the extraordinary weather.

And wow, what a year it’s been. Can’t remember a summer like it since ’76. I’ve moaned continually on this blog about the lack of water, but this is kindergarten stuff compared with the nightmare they’re enduring in Russia. My Muscovite in-laws are choking on smog, smoke and 40ºC. People are dying from it.

If this is the future – ie if this is what global warming looks like – we’re all in for a very bumpy and painful ride. Hold on to your hats.

Instead of me moaning on, here’s an extended anti-cat whinge (or anti-cat-shit whinge, to be precise) from the redoubtable writer and broadcaster Emma Cooper, compere and creator of the Alternative Kitchen Garden. It’s a lot more interesting that anything I could write today… and you may even learn something.

Take it away, Emma:

“Cats. Small ones are cute. Larger ones can be when they want to be. They have claws though, so I’m not entirely sure why people encourage them to sit on their laps and think they make good pets. Personally I find them completely unlovable for one reason – they crap in my garden.

They don’t crap in the out-of-reach places where I wouldn’t notice the smell. They crap in the middle of the bloody beds. Why? Personally I like a little more privacy for my personal moments, but apparently dead centre in a nicely planted bed is best for crapping if you’re a cat. Never mind that you’ve had to trample over an entire army of seedlings to get there (and it will be the second army of seeds sown, since the first will have been wiped out by the inevitable slug invasion of early spring).

And once they’ve done it, they make these laughable attempts to cover it over – which do nothing to cover the crap, or mask the smell (why should it? They need the smell to find their toilet again tomorrow) but only serves to disturb more of the benighted plants.

Commercial cat deterrents work on one of two principles – scaring cats away with loud (ultrasonic) noises or persuading them to crap elsewhere by making the area in question smell worse than cat crap. The citrus-smelling stuff doesn’t smell too bad, although it does pong, but you can buy packets of crap from bigger cats (on the basis that moggies are shit scared of tigers) – which surely just misses the point? I mean, weeing around the edge of your plot is supposed to deter foxes, but who wants a garden that smells of stinky wee?

There is another problem with these deterrents – they don’t get rid of the cats. They move the cats on. When the batteries run out, or the smell wears off, they will be back. In the meantime they will still be crapping in your garden, but in areas outside the reach of the deterrents that they’d previously left in peace.

Having said that, I think we’ve found a solution. Chicken manure pellets smell really strongly, and their smell deters cats from shitting in your garden. You can spread them liberally all around, re-apply as necessary, and the only side effect is that next year your courgettes will be enormous. No more crapping, no more trampled seedlings, no more dug up plants.

Of course, your garden will still smell of shit….”

I think we can safely file that one under ‘rants’, Emma, and I hope everyone chips in with their solutions for dealing with cat shit in the garden or down the allotment…

PS Anyone got a pic of a cat shitting which I can use to illustrate this piece?

So here’s the truth: they’re bloody tiny. Some are barely bigger than the sets I planted back in March. For scale, the wires on the rack are about 4cm apart.

Oddly, though (especially odd given my usual gloomy outlook on these things), I’m strangely nonchalant about this. In fact, it barely registers on my give-a-fuck-o-meter.

Because I have genuinely given up on this season, psychologically speaking.

I spent 80 minutes watering my allotment tonight. Barely reached the roots of anything. Like trying to heat St Paul’s cathedral with a cigarette lighter.

I have no further news.

I did get a harvest of peas last week, but only enough to feed two concentration camp internees. Or perhaps one anorexic… on a diet.

Mind, I don’t feel so bad about the peas as I do about, say, the lousy onions. Peas are always a bugger to grow well, even in ‘good’ seasons. You’ve got the disgusting pea moth, whatever you do. And in my area, pigeons target pea plants with single-minded ruthlessness.

As I’m fond of saying (this year, at any rate): there’s always next year.