Truly, the garden is a chaos right now. As we all know, there have been multiple heatwaves and about five minutes of rain all summer. Which has affected the plants, obviously. But also my ability to be out in the garden. It's like scorched earth out there. The lawn is just yellow. It hasn't needed a mow since I can't remember when. There's a massive crack in the soil through the cabbages. The leeks haven't grown a centimetre in a month. Look away for a second and the lettuces have shot up to knee height. I've got a water butt and immediately after installing it a few years ago we had the driest of winters. It's currently empty. I catch all the spare water from cooking and lug it out into the garden. We're not actually under a hosepipe ban but that's not the point. Another problem this year is that I've been away at critical junctures. My tomatoes stalled for a while. Then they should have been planted out. But I was going on holiday and didn't want to plant little babies then abandon them. So that was at least two weeks. Plus how late they already were. I'm getting some now but I'm too scared to look back at my logs to see where they were this time last year. Same with the squashes - I was late putting them out and they are sulking. Nature is the ultimate constraint. Got to work around it. That, I think, is the real challenge of gardening. There's no resting on laurels, no following a yearly blueprint and expecting the same results. Last year I had no carrots and loads of French beans. This year, tonnes of carrots and about three French beans. Nature of course is not acting alone. I was speaking to the person running the plant show at the fete yesterday who said they'd had to change the categories because of the changing climate - the fruit and veg ready this time of year is changing. I didn't enter anything because I didn't know whether I was coming or going and there's no prize for tallest lettuce. Yet. Despite this the garden is still full of wildlife. Butterflies, caterpillars, dragonflies, bats, frogs, all the usual suspect birds and squirrels. Less fun wildlife: my wife, who has extremely poor passive perception, went in the garden after we'd been away for a few days. She was looking at the tomatoes. I was like, "Were you going to tell me about that huge dead rat on the lawn?" She replied, "What dead rat?" It was about fifty centimetres from her and covered in flies. It was really big. Not a scratch on it. There's an adventurous bramble making its way from one side of the garden straight across the lawn to the other. And I'm leaving it. Good on it. Something is growing at least.