A note to the sky..

I have had enough of this weather! Have you? Yesterday morning we were sat in the living room being deafened by rain pelting against the windows, the whole road was flooded and there was no sign of it letting up. Then came the thunder and lightening, what a great insight in to summer time this was.

However, cometh the afternoon it was blazing sun with temperatures at 25 degrees celcius. I made my way to the allotment and came back in the evening with blackcurrants, lettuce, strawberries, raspberries and a tickle of SUNBURN!

Absolutely unbelievable. It is so hard to plan days at the allotment when the weather is so varied. Thankfully yesterday afternoon was good enough for me to get a lot of weeding done and also plant out the carrots we had started off in old loo rolls. We also planted some lettuces which we bought from a large food retailer that I work for. They were those cut and come again 'living lettuces' that are quite fashionable in the high end supermarkets. They had apparently exceded their sell by date and thus were destined for the bin (how a living thing can exceed it's sell by date is beyond me!), but I did manage to get them via a friend for 8p each from the staff waste sale. We had 15 so they are all now planted up and should in theory give us lettuce throughout the summer. We've picked some leaves from all of them to encourage them to produce new growth!

They are a gorgeous colour and I will be letting them go to seed at the end of summer to save seeds to plant again for next year!



We've planted 12 out in between the broad beans and dwarf french beans to fill a gap from the second lot of broad beans that failed to get going due to mice/bird problems. I don't normally use slug pellets but I've had to give in. We were losing a lettuce per day last week due to the wet conditions. We had tried using 100% natural organic pellets but they made no difference. So we have reverted back to the blue pellets but they are supposedly repellant and non toxic to domestic wildlife so that is good.

There are plenty more weeds to remove over the coming week, and I also want to get straw down at the top half of the plot to keep weeds down. The top area was awash with couch grass and the only way to get rid of it/to reduce it is to cover the area for 6 months or more. Obviously it would be suicidal to cover 1/3 of the allotment and not grow on it so we have dug over it several times and have planted it up with pumpkins, sweetcorn and some brassicas, so now I can cover around them with straw to keep the weeds at bay but also retain moisture for the vegetables if we do get a warm patch. Unlikely I know..

Anyway, I'm going to be catching up with other blogs today if I can. However, I do need to get up to the allotment and weed around the strawberries. I'll try and take lots more pictures to give you an idea of how the plot is doing.

Have a great weekend!

Martin