You know it’s summer when you have your first strawberries, when you can can a BBQ without it raining and when the England football team are playing badly – all three of which happened on Saturday.

Saturday afternoon at the allotment was great, we celebrated the nice weather with our first allotment bbq – featuring our own produce and some homemade burgers from home – delicious!  Before we could tuck into that we did have some work to do.  Pilla planted out the courgettes across both plots and weeded a fair bit of plot 118. 

I spent a while in the greenhouse attaching the tomatoes to their supports, it doesn’t seem that long ago we planted them on but a couple had go so big they had toppled over a bit.  On Sunday we had another move about in the greenhouse, taking down the staging at the side of the greenhouse so we could spread the peppers and tomatoes out and attached the tomato supports to the greenhouse.

After the great weather on Saturday, the forecast was a bit more dodgy today.  We managed to get a fair bit done though, Pilla had a good weed on the side of plot 97 and I planted out our cabbages over on plot 118.  We had a good weed around there too, covering the onion bed and generally all over as the soil had quite a lot of little weed seedlings growing.  The good news was the that rain overnight seemed to have given the beetroots some life, we were complaining two weeks ago they hadn’t germinated well, we planted some more (which have all now germinated too) and lo and behold we turn up today and there are tons of little seedlings.  We’ll probably have hundreds of beetroots now!  The lettuces are looking great, we’ve been taking loads off them lately (they have provided three lunches and lots of side salads with tea this week) and they are still massive.

One salad that didn’t grow well was the red spinach, it seemed to go straight from seedling to seed head, it was the fastest bolting thing we’ve ever grown.  We dug it up today and replanted, I’ve read something on the Internet (which I don’t really believe, but anyway) that plants are more likely to go to seed as the days are getting longer, has the days shorted the risk recedes.  We’ll see how that goes.