We go up another tier level this week, how are we going to cope with another lockdown? You can’t really go out in the garden as it’s a bit wet even though there’s been some warmer weather promised later this week. One job we will do is to get some gnat-free herb plants going on the kitchen windowsill after a summer of constant clouds of fungus gnats on our old pots. We’ve watered from the bottom and put up sticky traps and now going to admit defeat and starting again from scratch. More about the gnats and how to protect against them here.

We took some advice from the folks at Shannon’s and bought some indoor houseplant potting mix which should be free of any gnat’s eggs, put the old plants outside and give the actual pots a good clean with some disinfectant and then rinsed them through a few times for luck. It’s a bit early to be sowing anything really serious but we may start off a bit of basil (above: a few packs of seeds bought off ebay the other week) off in a pot with a see-through plastic bag on the top as a temporary greenhouse. As soon as the seeds show signs of propagation we’ll take the plastic off as to stop any damping off occurring.

Next summer we may be experiencing “a new normal” in the kitchen (ie. without clouds of gnats flying about or those sticky traps that don’t look too nice with lots of dead flies on them!)