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Welcome to Grow Cook Eat Arrange, the podcast of me, Sarah Raven, and I'm doing the Kitchen Garden mini-series. And this is actually episode six of seven. So we've got seven in this mini series. And the idea is to give you

the absolute sort of golden nuggets of veg growing. And it's really funny. I remember someone saying

to me when I was teaching many years ago now, towards the end of the day, she said to me,

why haven't you covered pests and diseases

in this veg course? Because that's the main reason I came. And I said, well, to be honest,

because I just don't think you get that many pests and diseases in the veg garden, or at least

we don't seem to hear, apart from, of course, slugs and snails,

which I'm coming on to.

But I realised that that was a bit smug.

And of course, there are pest and diseases.

And of course, when you're a beginner, they're very, very disheartening because you spend your time sewing stuff and then the slugs and snails eat it not you.

And that's depressing. So what do we do here

to avoid pests and diseases? Well, many things, but I just want to give you a kind of really

potted story of it. So the first thing is that we honestly do almost no direct sewing here at all.

Perhaps in June and July, when it's really hot in the polytunnel and so things will struggle,

we might do direct sewing.

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