Allotment Diary–Saturday 4th June

We’ve been away from the allotment for four days, so it’s remarkable to see how much everything has grown.  The dwarf beans being the best example, they were just breaking through a week ago, so much so that we could hardly see them to weed around and now look at them!

The salad beds have survived really well under the poly tunnels and are still thriving, although they would be in much better condition if they’d been picked more aggressively earlier on.  I pulled up another row of lettuce today and that filled a few bags, in it’s place went a row of red kale, which we’ve not eaten before.  We will be using this row as a pick and grow again crop all through summer hopefully.  Then later on we will put some up for over wintering in the main kale beds.

I also cropped a couple of bags of radish, and planted a row to replace them and another row of spinach.  The seeds I planted a week ago have all come through now, amazing progress.  The cucumber seeds from last week are now little plants and the tiny plug courgettes that came in the post the middle of last week are now substantial plants, I left them to grow in pots at the bottom of galvanised buckets with glass on top, which seems to suit them really well.

Caroline and Peter came over from the plot at the end of mine to have a look around and advised me to snip off the onion flowers to stop them bolting and they were amazed at the progress of my Asparagas, which apparently looks better than theirs did after three years!

Finally I did some strimming to generate a green later for my compost bin and shovelled compost from my 1st bin into my 2nd, which is really active at the moment – motoring along at 45 degrees!