It’s early November. Winter has come, and the gardening season is over. My tiny vegetable patch is going to sleep. It’s been a good year, in spite of a poor growing season: I’ve eaten fresh potatoes, handfuls of peas, ruby chard, abundant parsley and mint. I still have a small patch of leeks. My only real disappointment has been my new strawberry plants. Beautiful plump scarlet fruits, but when I turned them over, every single one had been hollowed out underneath. Not by slugs, but by woodlice. Do woodlice eat strawberries? Oh yes!

 I think that the most important thing I have finally learned from growing my own vegetables is that every few years your entire crop of a particular plant will fail, even if it has done really well previously. You can make it less likely to happen, and you can prepare for it by planting a variety of crops, but you can’t stop it happening entirely. You just have to learn to put up with it. The history of agriculture is the history of a perpetual struggle. There have always been pests, from birds to potato blight. The images in medieval manuscripts such as the Luttrell Psalter of monstrous birds stealing seed corn from a sack, or boys in the fields scaring birds with slings, are replaced today by photos of thousands of greylag geese sitting smugly in the barley fields of Orkney, which they have just stripped bare. Local farmers have to be given a licence to shoot a specified number of the birds every year. During the mid-19^th century (1845-52), a fungus-like disease called Phytophthora infestans – late blight – destroyed much of the potato crop in Europe. In Ireland, where for political and economic reasons a large proportion of the population were dependent on potatoes as their staple food and no-one intervened to help them, millions starved to death or were forced to emigrate. Scotland was badly hit as well. I have had to give up planting Brussels sprouts or indeed any brassicas, after two really good years, because somehow my vegetable patch has become infected with clubroot. The sprouts stood up to a plague of caterpillars but the virus defeated them. At least nowadays we know what causes it.

The Romans, who didn't know why these things happened, depended heavily on divine intervention. Their staple crop was wheat, and they had a large number of minor gods and goddesses to protect their crops at every stage from sowing to storage, including protection from diseases. A favourite of mine is Robigus who protected wheat from diseases, especially wheat rust, a nasty fungal disease. There are several kinds of wheat rust, the commonest being Puccinia triticina, wheat leaf rust. (Wheat rust still causes significant crop losses world-wide, but scientists have apparently identified a gene which facilitates wheat rust and are hoping to turn it off.) Robigus had his own festival on April 25th, the Robigalia, at which a dog was sacrificed. According to Ovid’s Fasti, the dog represented the Dog Star, Sirius. The weather at the rising of the Dog Star tended to be hot and dry and crops ripened too soon, which the Romans believed made them susceptible to wheat rust (Ovid, Fasti 4.905 – 941).

The most effective way to kill insects, fungi and viruses is to drench your crops in powerful pesticides. However we now realise that soaking your food and your fields in toxic chemicals carries its own dangers, even if it is more effective than sacrificing a dog. If you are a commercial market gardener, however, dependent on the requirements of a supermarket chain to remain in business, you may not have much choice about using chemical pesticides and fertilisers. Don’t forget that supermarket chains feed most of the population nowadays, so we are all involved.

Anyway, pesticides don’t always work. Take slugs, for example. I remember one year after I had taken over my father’s vegetable patch and was trying to grow potatoes, perpetual spinach and French beans. I had a friend who was into organic gardening, so I tried to protect my plants from slugs by encircling them with coffee grounds, crushed eggshells and collars cut from plastic bottles. One set of neighbours invested in expensive nematodes which were supposed to kill slugs the ‘natural’ way. The old gentleman on the other side used the traditional blue slug pellets full of who-knows-what chemicals. All our crops got eaten, without exception. The sight of three rows of potatoes entirely stripped of their leaves, when they had done brilliantly in previous years, discouraged me so much that I gave up growing anything for years. The only thing I have ever found to have any effect on slugs whatsoever is little saucers of beer (I usually cheer myself up by drinking the other half of the bottle, so even if it doesn’t stop the slugs it’s not a total write-off).

Companion planting is another non-toxic method of pest control which I use. I always plant marigolds and nasturtiums among my vegetables. I can’t remember which vegetables they are supposed to protect from pests, or indeed whether they really do anything, but they certainly look pretty and they are self-seeding. My habit of dotting my onion sets around my containers is supposed to help as well. I have just learned that planting onions, leeks or chives among your strawberries is supposed to deter pests. I’ll try it.

The sobering thought in all this is that if you are currently gardening as an amateur in the UK, you can always go down to the supermarket and buy a bag of potatoes or beans. If you have a bad year, it’s disappointing but you won’t starve. But if you are dependent on what you grow for staying alive, it’s another story. You had better have a surplus stored from a previous year, or good neighbours who will share.