It’s Summer Time

Saturday was like winter time, wet and cold. Sunday (morning) was like summer, Sunday afternoon was back to winter. During the week, summer came back.

The jobs were to re-cover the sprout plants to give them more room, and to start picking the currents. I had uncovered the parsnips and they seem to have survived any attacks by bugs so far. I’ve hopefully spaced out the sprouts much better than previous years and so I’m keen to continue to look after them well. They look all a bit squnched up having been under the low covers and suddenly set free, I’m sure given a couple of days they will sort themselves out. I made new covering much higher, although I’m aware I’ll probably have to re-enforce it for when it’s windy. Maybe I might be too late and on the next visit I’ll be rebuilding it.

I pulled up the winter onions and weeded the remaining onion bed. This part of the plot is where the gooseberries used to be and a bit of unused ground, it was riddled with bindweed before and it still is, even after a lot of digging it out. I don’t think that is the cause for the bad onion plants that I planted in the spring, that will be allium leaf minor maybe. Just like the leeks earlier on in the year, they seem to have got over it and are recovering, but unlike the leeks that had many more months in the ground, these onions won’t get that and so a poorer harvest maybe later on this month. In the meantime, I picked out a load of bindweed that was inbetween them.

The celeriac has suffered from a lot of slugs, and weeds, I’m still hopeful that some of them will get through and keep growing.

Carrots I sowed the other week (autumn king) have germinated and a small row is now visible, between the two current rows. I thinned these out, and the netting around them, not over them, seems to have stopped any bugs so far.

The white cabbage plants had outgrown their netting too, I fixed this by putting a second pallet collar on top of the first one and recovering with netting. That was all quick and easy.

I picked a couple of courgettes and I climbed into the fruit netting and picked as many redcurrants as I could. Next visit I’ll be picking blackcurrants and gooseberries.

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