A full day of rain of Saturday meant next day, hot and sunny, plants have liked it a lot. Tomato plants in the garden suddenly shot up. I spent time at the plot hoeing weeds and widening a bit of the paths with some of the woodchip that is still available. I was never really going to do this too much as it’s better to have flexible paths that you can move as needed each year and not have permanent beds. However, I have learnt quite well now that the edge of the plot by the trees in the field are too full of roots and too over shadowed by the trees for anything much to grow (apart from weeds it seems). So having a proper path along the edge is a good use of unusable space.

The swede plants at home have been ready to plant out for a little while and so I planted them out this morning. The bed I had prepared over the following weeks with plenty of rotted manure and this morning I dug it in a bit. I found last year when I just piled it on top of the existing soil all was good, but upon digging later on I found the top was all pretty good but underneath was just as hard as if you had never dug it, which you hadn’t of course. So now I lightly dig it in, really lightly. A bit of hoeing and then some raking.

On the way out of the plot I noticed a large blackberry bush in some of the plot wasteland and so thought I would help myself for one or two berries. It turned out that this bush had massive blackberries on it, and even though I had seen other people picking from it earlier on in the day, there were still millions of them. A filled a pot and left feeling rather pleased.

Swedes planted, path laid, I picked raspberries, courgette, and cucumber. A bit of hoeing to get with the on going bindweed.

At home, I spotted little cucamelons growing. These plants have taken months to get this far, I had given up on them really. Months back, they took ages to germinate, then they took ages to start climbing, ages for their tiny little flowers and then ages for any fruit to appear. Now they have to grow a little bit larger, hopefully that won’t take ages.

Carrots and parsnips are not looking their best in the garden, I think they have all been very close to each other, under netting and full of warm moist air which spores or all sorts of things love and don’t do things much good. Having uncovered them, the parsnips are starting to fight back, which is what I was hoping for. Parsnips seem to do that, even last year when some of them were mostly eaten away, they had new growth on them within days and fully recovered. The carrots however might not get much further than they are now. So good job I did plant some at the plot, and good job I have some more seed and so put some in at the garden and some more at the plot.

The area where the potatoes were had been left, apart from a small bit which I planted the kale and the left over cucumbers. This afternoon I started to hoe this bit to break the soil up. At soon as we dug up the lawn we planted potatoes in this bit and so it never had the compost dug in like other parts, so the soil it pretty hard and clay like.

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