The lettuces are at an end, eaten from above by our customers and from below by the aphids. Caterpillars, too, were making a home for themselves in our garden, until we uprooted the caldo verde that they enjoyed so much. I must have found a dozen speckled black and white beings squeezed together, methodically eating every green inch of a leaf, leaving 
only a fibrous skeleton before moving on to the next.
We had to get rid of the aphid-infiltrated compost before we could begin again, clearing out pots and scrubbing them clean. The dirty job over, we turned to our spinach seedlings. Each one was showing two spinach leaves proper, in addition to the cotyledon (seed leaves) that announce the plants' entrance to the world.
Mark showed Justin how to delicately transplant the seedlings and pot them up into our newer, shallower pots. They interspersed them with a few red leaf lettuces, before sowing some French parsley, in the hope of a late crop, in what has been a sunny growing season in East Anglia.
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