Which are the most precious, cabbages or pigeons? Well, if I’ve planted the cabbages there’s no argument. Pigeons have been a real nuisance in the kitchen garden this year, virtually destroying our cabbage patch. Fortunately there’s help at hand. Before breakfast this morning my youngest daughter, wearing her camouflage gear, climbed the Prospect Tower which overlooks the kitchen garden, with her 1.78 rifle, ready for the kill. ​

“Fiction was invented the day Jonah arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale”
           - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
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The respected Lake District hotelier, and my keen business rival, Simon Berry, came to Christianity in a remarkable way. He was a non-believer and his wife was trying to convert him. Simon was having nothing of it but said “If I’m handed a bible, free, in the next seven days I’ll be convinced”. Six days later he was in a second hand book shop when the woman behind the counter took out a book and gave it to him. It was a bible. Simon asked “How much do you want for it?” to which she replied “Nothing”. “Thank you very much”, he said “you’ve changed my life”. He has been a committed Evangelist Christian ever since.
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Borough Market is by far the best farmer’s market in central London and it’s no exaggeration to say that it owes its vitality to Cumbrians. Of these the most vital is Peter Gott. Peter dominates the meat side of things in the market, is good friends with Jamie Oliver and has become a bit of a celebrity in his own right (Jamie catches some of Peter’s glory). In a way, Peter was responsible for me starting to keep pigs, and later to buy a farm, because I wanted him to supply my hotels with his meat but he told me that the toffs at Borough Market were taking all his produce. ​

This morning I reached into my raincoat pocket and came across a valuable, iconic, work of art. It was one of Ai Weiwei’s sunflower seeds. I was lucky enough to visit his sunflower seeds installation at Tate Modern when the public were allowed, indeed encouraged, to handle the seeds and throw them into the pile. A few weeks earlier the public had been allowed to walk on the seeds, but Tate Modern banned that in a gesture of solidarity with the authoritarian regime in China. ​

I’m bemused, bewitched and bewildered by Kirsty Barnby (see here for her website). She’s an auburn haired beauty with freckled skin who belongs in the shades of the far north and yet she has embarked on a career in the searing sun. She’s an eco-warrior who wants everyone to go everywhere by bicycle and yet has set up a tourism business which you can only reach by crossing the globe in a jet. What’s more, her fledgling enterprise is in a place which has a climate and a political setup which is as unstable as anywhere on earth. ​

Can gardening lead you on the road to Nirvana? There’s a professor who has spent a lifetime studying the meaning of happiness who believes it can. The professor is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi*, who has developed the theory of “flow” which he describes as “being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one”. This complete absorption in a task can be something as mundane as weeding or dead-heading. ​

These pictures, both taken today, show two beds of dahlias, growing side by side, which were planted out at the same time but which have grown at very different rates. The top picture shows dahlias grown in soil which was given a mulch of cow manure and the bottom picture shows dahlias grown with a mulch of horse manure. I’m surprised by how much more fertile the cow manure has turned out to be. As I wrote in February (see here) I was forced to buy some cow manure because my usual supplier of horse manure had run out. I was afraid it would be full of weeds, and this turned out to be the case, mainly grass and nettles. But the faff of pulling out the weeds is more than compensated for by the magnificent power of the fertiliser. The horse manure is weed free and also looks much better when it’s first applied but I don’t think I’ll be so sniffy about using cow manure in the future.

I first got to know Makiko Sato when she pleaded with me to borrow some turf on the eve of judging day at the Chelsea Flower Show in 2010. She was the construction manager in charge of more than two dozen workers at Kazu Ishihara’s Japanese garden, which was next door to mine. It was a pleasure to help her out, not least because she had worked her socks off to create a beautiful garden and she deserved to succeed. ​

The monsoon arrived late in Bangladesh this year, possibly because it took a detour via Grange-over-Sands. The flooding here was so severe that a canoe was seen on Windermere Road. The heavy rain came with some nasty gales and sometimes I dreaded opening the curtains for fear of seeing a scene of devastation outside. But the damage has been relatively mild; one or two trees have lost branches but the plants seem OK and all the dahlias have stayed upright even though they aren’t staked. ​