June update

Mid-June and the allotment is starting to come alive now. The Squashes planted out a few weeks ago are starting to get established and spread out. Eventually they will cover all visible surfaces. The Bonbon Squash are the first to start flowering (see above). As you can also see the weeds are also starting to take hold!


Courgettes have very quickly got up to speed and after picking the first one last week, there are more ready for picking. The first yellow courgette is just about ready for picking (see above) and no doubt they will be coming thick and fast from now on.


The Parsnips (left) are looking very healthy now, as are the Sweetcorn plants (middle). On the right you can see the Leeks, Beetroot and Lettuce that I weeded at the weekend. The Leeks are still in their initial row where they were sown, but they're probably only a couple of weeks away from being ready to plant out into their final individual holes.


The French Beans (above) are coming along nicely too and a few have started flowering. The extra ones that I direct sowed, to fill in for the lack of plants that grew when I started the seeds off at home, have come up and completed the middle row.


I picked the first load of Peas at the weekend. These are the Kelvedon Wonder sown in April. There are tons to be picked, I started by picking and podding half a carrier bags worth (see above) but this is only a fraction of what is still on the plants.


The Brassicas planted out about a month ago under their Enivormesh frame have filled out very quickly and already they look far too squashed together. I should have spaced them out more, but that would have meant leaving some uncovered. Hopefully they'll put up with being squashed together though.


Since the first couple of sowings or Carrots hasn't been all that successful so far, I decided to do a later sowing of Autumn King this weekend. I had been covering the Carrots with fleece over tunnel hopes, but this is never very good as the fleece always seems to get ripped and torn by the wind and rain. So I now have an Enivromesh Tunnel for them (see above).

Tomatoes Planted

Over the past week I have been planting out the Tomatoes at the front of the allotment (see above). There are 18 plants in total, 6 each of Gardeners Delight, Golden Sunrise and Sungold. They are all cherry tomato varieties, Red, Orange and Yellow respectively. Each plant is tied to a 6ft cane with plenty of manure dug into the soil.


I have also been training the runners on the Strawberry plants into pots of compost. They are held into position with a U-shaped piece of garden wire and hopefully they will root and grow in the pots until I am ready to start a new strawberry bed in the autumn. This worked well last year and allowed me to start a second bed this year. At the end of the season I intend to pull up my original strawberry bed to make way for a shed (thanks Becks!), and start a new strawberry bed just next to where it currently is.


Last night I picked the first Courgette of the year. They were planted out on 11th May, and just a month later they've started producing Courgettes. This one is a little smaller than I'd normally pick, but I couldn't resist. There are several more that are nearly ready. I'm also still picking strawberrys (although they've slowed down a bit now) and raspberrys (which are coming faster now).

Planting out Squashes

Over the past couple of weeks I have planted out all of the Squashes and Pumpkins. There are 2 Pumpkins (Spellbound), 7 Butternut Squashes (Sprinter) and 18 Squash (5 Festival, 4 Futsu, 5 Uchiki Kuri and 4 Bon Bon). For each I dug a spade sized hole, filled it with manure, covered with soil and then planted the plant. A couple of handfuls of grass clippings was added around each one as a mulch. A 4-ft cane marks the position of each plant to make it easy to identify where to water them once they grow and spread out, merging into one big mass of leaves.


The Kelvedon Wonder peas are flowering and forming pods (see above) so should be ready for picking before too long.


The Potatoes have put on a lot of growth (see above) and are now merging into one huge mass of leaves.


I've now started picking Strawberrys and Raspberrys and the Strawberry plants are already sending out runners (see above) which I will shortly be training into pots ready to start a new Strawberry bed next year.


At home I've sown Purple Sprouting Broccoli into newspaper pots (see above) and left them in the plastic mini greenhouse. The seedlings are already growing fairly well.