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ANOTHER LIFE:IT WAS NOT the best of summers in which to start growing your own. So much rain, so many blight warnings, such green waves of weeds, so little sunshine to reward brave experiments with outdoor sweetcorn, squashes, peppers, bush tomatoes. Whole legions of slugs mowed down one’s seedlings. Write it off, perhaps, to experience — gardeners invented “going forward”. But some things should have done well – cabbages, cauliflowers, broccoli, for example. And along with the novel pleasure of bringing such homegrown vegetables to the kitchen sink for the first time, there could arise encounters, infrequent since childhood, with native invertebrate wildlife, writes MICHAEL VINEY

Hosed out from their crevices, slugs of the minor sort are yucky but unintimidating. Invisibly green, moth caterpillars can be a special nuisance when hiding in heads of broccoli (which, for that reason, I grow under a net) but this year’s rain has, in any case, reduced lepidopteral flying hours. Which leaves the earwig, Forficula auricularia, to wash out from the cool, labyrinthine interiors of cauliflowers, in particular.