Ladies and Gentlemen, it's war!
I believe I shall look back on 2008 as The Year I Became A Gardener.
Also as The Year I Became A Cold-Blooded Murderess.
The two things are not unrelated.
I love gardening. It took me 27 years to realise it, but there it is. My husband and I began with a yard waist-high with docks and nettles and pretty much nothing else.
(It was something of a surprise. When we came to visit before buying the house, the garden was neatly mowed. We only learned when we moved in that the neighbours used to call it 'the jungle'.)
Anyway, we dug, weeded, hauled out a ton of dirt, hauled in a ton of gravel, sweated, cemented, bricklaid, dug again, bled, hammered, cried, dug some more...well, you get the idea.
Actually, my husband did most of that. Except the crying (he'd kill me if I allowed that to slip by).
I mainly provided coffee and sieved soil. And grew things. I raised hundreds of plants from seed. I would like to say this was because of some purist gardening ethic. It was actually because I am a cheapskate.
But I did find it very satisfying, watching my babies grow.
So many different emotions. Doubt as I stared at the bare soil in the greenhouse. 'D'you think they're duds?' I questioned my husband anxiously. 'No', he replied. 'You only planted them yesterday.'
Relief and pride as the first pale green shoots pushed their way out of the soil.
Amazement at the speed with which they shot up. Some of them, anyway. I am still waiting on the campanulas. Perhaps because my cat decided to use that seed tray as a bed 
.
True delight as I finally placed my tender new plants in the ground...their destiny fulfilled.
And then, finally, mounting horror as I went down the next morning and...they had disappeared. Almost all of them. Nothing left except the odd green stump or sad-looking shred of leaf.
That was when I felt the white-hot, unholy rage. It was their fault.
The Slugs.
They had to go. Now.
I began my war tentatively. I didn't actually want to kill them. Or my cats, which would undoubtedly view slug pellets as an exciting new treat. Or at least consider it their right to eat them, even if they did taste foul and make them sick.
So I did some internet research, and found a whole host of organic methods for slug control.
Many of them weren't even that murderous. But those were all so expensive. So I took a deep breath, and put out some beer traps.
It was a wet night. By morning, I had captured 40 of the miniature monsters. Initial triumph (involving a war-dance round the garden, in my dressing gown) turned to tears as I peered into the foul-smelling jars. The little bodies just looked so pitiful. Poor wee things. They didn't even die happy, because the beer had gone off. I was evil.
I didn't really function for the rest of the morning. Especially after I realised, beer traps or not, the slugs had finished off the rest of my morning glories overnight.
I was in mourning. I kept away from my garden for the next few days.
But then something happened. A small switch seemed to flick in my brain. Sure, slugs might be God's Creatures. But My Garden, I decided, was More Important Than Them. They probably didn't even have a central nervous system. Whatever that meant.
Since then, it has been all-out war. And I have to confess, I am loving it 
.
My methods and strategies are numerous. Beer traps, organic slug pellets, coke-bottle cloches (yep, I encourage coke consumption these days), copper tape, night raids with a torch (those are my personal favourites)...
Every morning, I bound triumphantly up the stairs to give my hubby (still in bed) the latest campaign updates. He groans and opens one eye as I report eagerly:
'An excellent night for our boys, sir. A few minor casualties in the greenhouse, but nothing to worry about. The Hun were completely unable to penetrate our cloche defences. Ingenious, sir, ingenious, if I do say it myself. And 42 fatalities in the enemy camp, 40 privates (that's the little ones) and two Majors (you know, the ones with the big orange stripes around the bottom).'
This could be seen as a little insensitive to my husband. He is in the military. He has been to war, himself.
But he doesn't mind. He just wants me to shut up so he can go back to sleep.
Errm, I could do with making this about weight loss, somehow.
And here we go...what have I learned from this whole experience (except that I am a foul Killer who can cast my morals aside like trash when it suits?)
Well, gardening has not been what I expected. I started the spring with clear ideas about how my yard would turn out. I envisioned a perfect English country garden. A gorgeous planting scheme of stunning, healthy specimens. The sort of garden that would blow my neighbours' out of the water.
Things haven't turned out quite that way. I encountered Problems.
Not all my seeds grew. Some of the plants didn't transplant well. Some died for no reason I could see. The rest were munched by slugs/trampled by cats/squashed by the neighbour's ball.
And it has all taken so long. I thought I would be relaxing in my paradise by now...but it is nowhere near finished.
Predictably, I knew straight away why all this had happened. It was My Fault. I was a Rubbish Gardener. I had Failed.
If I had been more educated/harder-working/better, this wouldn't have happened.
So I decided to forget about working on my yard. What was the point?
Except, I kept remembering how much I liked gardening. So I decided to have another try.
After more computer research, I realised a few things. Firstly, yes, some of the things that happened were down to me not knowing enough. I had done some things to harm my plants. But that was OK. It takes people years to learn about gardening. Mistakes are just a part of that.
Secondly, whatever I did, some problems were bound to occur. That is just the way gardening is. I had scoffed at the instructions on the seed packet. Plant them all? 150 of them? How wasteful, I only need 15 plants!
But I didn't allow for the facts of life - that however hard you work, some seeds just don't grow, some plants aren't strong, and some will always be eaten by slugs. And even if I do get my garden looking how I want it, the work to maintain that will be immense.
I had to accept these things as a part of gardening and just get on with it. I had to learn it doesn't matter if some of my stocks don't flower because I planted them too late, it doesn't matter if my ageratum looks a bit nibbled, it doesn't matter if my garden is that little bit less than perfect. It will still be beautiful and it will still be mine.
Gardening has taught me that I have a personality that likes perfection, in a world that is always flawed.
In gardening, and in life, I have to accept setbacks.
The same applies to weight loss. It won't turn out the way I planned. Things will go wrong - with my own behaviour and with life in general. Those things won't have easy fixes. It will get to summer and I will be less than half as far along as I thought I would be. And even when I do arrive at my goal, my battle to maintain my new weight will only just be beginning.
But if I keep going, I will learn as I go along. I will find ways of coping with those curve balls. I will get results, in the end. And, even those results aren't quite what I imagined, I will have achieved something beautiful just by making something a little better out of what I had.
And the slugs?
Well, luckily, I had some backup plants.
Most of them have survived, so far.
It's a war of attrition. I am going to have to keep on murdering the little blighters, probably forever...but hey, at least it's fun . Mwah ha ha! Love Rach 