Allotment Diary–Tuesday 7th June

I’ve continued to work on clearing the weeds from the area under the trees and made good planting progress there as well.  I built the bean frame yesterday and planted runner beans today, I’ve put in a variety that’s not meant to go stringy, which means that even though they are being planted late, they should crop until the first frost.  I’ve also planted up dwarf beans and peas in the new frame I did yesterday.  I still have space for another frame which I will plant mid June.

Next I cleared out the last row of rocket, which was well past it’s best and replaced it with a row of a new variety of red lettuce, I also pulled a row of radish and replaced that with the lettuce too.  I’ve been looking for more red leaves to plant and this one looks great.

I also pulled out the last of my current crop of oriental salads, which were a tangled mess and planted spinach.  Only a week ago this whole bed was heaving with salads, but it’s an important lesson in the need to pick every day to keep the plants under control, especially when they are planted as tight together as I’m growing them.  Still the plants I pulled are now busy making a nice hot compost bin.

I’m not a huge spinach fan, but so many of the people I supply with veg seem to love it so I’ve planted a reasonable amount.  I have oriental lettuce planted elsewhere that should be cropping next week and in the mean time I have half a dozen hearted lettuces and plenty of chard to keep me going.  I’ve chosen this nice baby leaf lettuce, which seems good for summer salads.

Now that I’ve closed the wormery down for summer I have 4 large plastic trays sitting around doing nothing, so I’ve filled two with a mix of soil, manure and mushroom compost and two with just soil.  The ones with soil are perfect for small salad carrots and I’ve planted the first of these with a heritage mix, the second tray will be planted in mid June.

The other two trays have cucumber and courgettes as an experiment.  I already have both of these in the ground, but I want to see how they fare in containers, free of weeds.  I’ve put all of the trays higher up on an old pallet, away from weeds.

Finally I pricked out four rows of cauliflower, kale, and broccoli which are going to be used as a pick and come again crop and gave all of my fruit bushes a good water.  I don’t normally bother with watering established bushes, but they are cropping very heavily and we’ve not had rain for weeks.