Sweet Harmony

What a month June has been. In the last week we’ve had beautiful blue skies and high temperatures (~30° on Friday) but night-time temperatures still fell to 3.4°! And now we’ve finally had some welcome rain. What a great growing-month.

So happy to have teasels on the wildlife plot

We had a couple of early morning visits to the plot in the week, to water and enjoy the sights and sounds of the waking allotment. So beautiful, but I only had an hour before returning home to start work 😔. A benefit of a morning visits is picking fresh veg to have for lunch. That scrummy salad included broad beans, radish and mangetout.

Other days we’ve had lunchtime plot visits. Aah, working from home definitely has benefits, but I have my fifth(!) COVID vaccination at the end of month so maybe things will change… we’ll see.

Those are some of the flower seedlings that I potted on a couple of weeks ago including lobelia, zinnia and love lies bleeding. In fact I planted some of them out yesterday and their roots had grown well in 2 weeks. I’m concerned for the zinnia as slugs apparently love the seedlings 😖 Will discover later whether they survived their first rainy night in the wild…

Okay, I agree, it doesn’t look much at the moment but I’m hoping that will be a riot of colour in front of our bench quite soon.. If you want colour you have to visit the wildlife plot which is looking lovely.

I’m pleased to say that the squash tunnel is now mostly planted: 2 x Honeyboat, 2 x Festival, 2 x Sunshine  and, thanks to plot-neighbour Kate, 1 x Butternut and 1 x Spaghetti.

I’ve left positions for the 2 x Winter Celebration squashes which have only just germinated, about 10 days after the other varieties. It seems that they may prefer the warmer temperatures.

The climbing beans (French, borlotti, runners and one Gigantes) are, well, climbing and yesterday I planted out the three Yin Yang dwarf French beans that managed to germinate. The mangetout have been providing small harvests for me, if they make it home, and I’ve been enjoying the Chinese Dragon radish. They’re peppery and crisp and, as you can see, much better than ‘normal’ radish.

The ‘normal’ radish have all been resigned to the compost bin as they’ve gone to seed - like they inevitably do. I don’t think I’ll bother in future; I’ll stick with the Chinese varieties.

Yesterday was a HAHA workday. We cleared the site of rubbish and surplus ‘junk’ followed by cake and a cuppa.

Which reminds me that I haven’t mentioned the HAHA stall at the jubilee picnic. I wasn’t interested in the party, but when I went along to help set-up I couldn’t resist staying to help with the stall. We made over £60 and gained three new members on the waiting list, so it was very worthwhile. Our site is currently full again, which is great.

And our plots are almost full too! We’ve planted 15 Lark sweetcorn, chard, a love lies bleeding and 2 sunflowers on the last quarter of Plot7.

So it’s been a busy month so far. I hope we get outside in some sunshine today so I’d better get off my butt!

We’ve been watching TOTP from the 1990s on BBC4, which is why the song is provided by Beloved and it refers to the DELICIOUS pairing of rhubarb and strawberries - mmmmm, that smell ❤️