1st - 10th July

A quick visit to the allotment to see that my one remaining sunflower has been eaten as well. There is simply no sign of it anywhere.

It’s true what they say about sweet peas. The more you pick, the more they grow. Whereas a lot of plants really take a hit when pruned severely, these sweet peas just thrive on regular cutting. This means we get a steady stream of cut flowers for indoors whilst the outside ones keep producing flowers – fantastic! There are rumours of heavy rain tonight so rather than have rain-soaked and damaged flowers tomorrow, I decided to pick a load tonight, and there seemed twice as many as 2 days ago.

 

 

2^nd July
Just a quick visit to the allotment to water the plants.

4^th July

Spent an hour and a half weeding the 9^th section, where I’ll be planting out the sprouting broccoli. It was tough going as the ground is pretty hard. I will trial that weed suppressing membrane on this section this year to see if it is any good against our variety of weeds. I watered, tied in the cucumbers, and planted out 8 spinach plants in section 2.

5^th July

The 5 free lavender plants I ordered as a special offer from Gardeners’ World Magazine arrived today so they were promptly potted on. Apart from that, I weeded and mowed.

7^th July

We’ve had a fair bit of rain the last 2 days so gardening has been put off. I did, however sneak a quick visit to the allotment just to see if any courgettes were ready for picking. A couple looked promising last week. To my delight, 3 were ready for harvesting, 2 green and 1 yellow. We had a green one for tea. So the courgette harvesting season is upon us and if it's like last year we will be well provided for.

10^th July

The heavy rain has continued until today when we just had a few light showers. The ground is sopping wet and I can only imagine what the allotment would be like if I were to try any ground work. When I did pop in I found my Dad picking raspberries and blackcurrants. He gave me some runner beans which were part of a swap he did with another plot holder. I like runner beans but as soon as I find a stringy spine I am put off eating anymore. At the Gardener’s Question Time garden party, I spoke to Pippa Greenwood about a comparative trial of runner beans that she wrote about in Gardener’s World Magazine. She had found that some were truly stringless. I asked her if that really meant stringless as I wasn’t sure if there were other parts that may be stringy or not, but the spine always is. She assured me that unless you left them on the plant for months, they did not get stringy. So next year, I may grow them!

Whilst at the allotment I also picked 3 more courgettes.

 

Next post: 18th July