I want to write about tidiness and chaosness. More about chaosness than tidiness. I know chaosness is not yet a word, but it attempts to describe what I want to write about today. It is about disorder, about allowing, about being with what is.

I have ten dwarf kale plants in pots in the garden here. Louise and I were looking at them yesterday and we found some tiny caterpillars. Tiny hungry caterpillars. They were on two of the plants. Rather than destroy the caterpillars, I simple moved the plants away from the others, and I will observe them and allow the little beasts to feed. Why not? I have eight other plants here, and more planted at the allotment. I have plenty of kale. And maybe a blue tit will get a meal or two out of it.

The story is slightly different with slugs and snails. I go out at night and remove any large ones that are intent on eating my plants, although I do not kill them. I put them on the compost heap, or I pop them over the wall into the passageway that runs beside the garden, where they can take their chances. Also I do not remove them all. If I see one eating some dead plant debris, I leave it. My friend Liz has concocted a clove mixture which she sprays on her most attacked plants and says it works, but somehow I want to do it my way, with minimum intervention and maximum collaboration. I’m collaborating with slugs, OK, I confess that’s weird.

The rest of the story this week will be told in pictures. Finding a bee orchid on a walk on Greenham Common, a day at the cricket in Bristol, planting leeks on my allotment this week, protecting strawberries with a cage made from part of a broken bed and some old fencing, some new cardboard cultivation and an pretty area of love-in-the-mist that I planted when I put in the shed last year – a handfull of seed chucked onto some bare earth. It’s been a struggle to get this out at all. I wrote the three paragraphs above on Saturday. The pictures tell of a good and interesting week, and the chaosness is largely internal! Being with what is. Not always easy.

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