Sweltering June 2005

Photo shows purple sprouting broccoli just planted, broad beans, onions, romanescue under the fleece to keep the butterflies off.

The main memories of June were the lack of rain. There were just a couple of downpours, so I spent a lot of time trundling up and down with watering cans which I filled from the tanks behind my shed.

Last year my pig muck was just put in a pile, so Monday 13th June I was up the allotment for 5 hours and made a new compost bin for the pig muck I had ordered and one for the horse manure that a friend is delivering on a weekly basis this year. Apparently a mixture of the two are about the best you can get. That remains to be seen. The horse manure bin - poor Pat is still mowing that same stretch of lawn, he has grown out of his trousers he has been doing it for so long, bless him. (It's ok, he is not computer literate so he'll never see this) This comment is a joke - British humour - Pat is a treasure and I couldn't manage without his encouragement and support. So please don't think otherwise.


I did a lot of weeding and strimming – mainly the weeds of my neighbours plots to try and keep them away from my boundaries as their weeds were in flower and starting to shed their seeds too.

It was extremely hot the last week of the month and I was picking my first year of soft fruit crops, blackcurrants, strawberries, raspberries, gooseberries, and rhubarb. Not a tremendous amount of each – but just wait until next year. I had 7 currant bushes that did not fruit, white and red currants, so if anyone has any ideas why that might be, please do let me know.

The peppers and pumpkins which I grew from seed were planted. Whether I will get a crop of peppers remains to be seen, but it is worth the experiment for a small outlay.

I needed lots of CD bird scarers, to keep bids off all my crops, so I spent ages tying them on to bamboo canes.

The second lot of runner beans that I planted were successfully growing and at the end of the month I was picking mange tout, broad beans, and young peas. But the weather was so hot and dry everything was struggling to survive the drought. But the salad seemed to do well though.