The hot weather has helped with the soft fruit, which I had planned to pick a load off next week but ended up doing it this week instead. Well over 1kg of strawberries, I thought last week we had reached the peek, I’m pretty sure we have now.

I had been watching the black currents getting bigger and blacker over the last weeks, the netting to keep the birds off had really made a huge difference. A quick visit to do watering in the evening turned into a big black current picking session as each time I moved the branches of the bushes I found more little cache’s of berries. While I was doing this, Rachael managed to fill another punnet of strawberries. I put off picking gooseberries until the next day where I picked as many as I could before my arms could not suffer being more scratched.

The resulting fridge full of soft fruit meant Sunday night we made strawberry jam while finding spare jars for some black current jam later on in the week.

I didn’t pick and of the spring broad beans, I’ll leave those for next time. I did bring back rhubarb, chard, beetroot and turnips.

I spent ages weeding under a lot of the netting. Carrots which had mostly all been eaten are now much healthier, maybe I should not had pulled up so many when they looked like they would never survive. The replacement sowing is starting to show but I might do some more. I weeded the parsnips and celeriac which had both been under netting since they nearly got eaten by the small black bugs. Both have grown greatly and looking a bit cramped under the netting. I left the celeriac uncovered but with netting round them, I’ll see how they cope.

Courgettes had not done much over the last month and even the day before they looked a bit bigger but still no fruits. A return visit the next day showed the plant doubled in size and with three little courgettes starting to grow.

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