Lots going on both at home and at the plot.

At home I pulled the over wintered onions and they are drying off, that means all such onions are now drying from both the garden and the plot. I filled the space in the garden with the small tomato plants.

Peas plants are growing very tall and lots of pods, some of them feel they might be about ready while others still look like mangetout. I have been watering them each day, along with the butternut squash which had looked a bit small and weedy for ages but have now taken hold.

From the garden we continue to pick lettuce, but we picked our first beetroot and spring onions.

On the plot I have been picking a lot of strawberries, some made it home. I have been watering a lot and noticing the water level in the trough not returning to the top, over the week the level had become quite low. I wondered if this was the council turning the water off, but the tap still worked. In the end, after turning a different tap a bit, everything sprung into life and the trough started to fill. While it was doing this I did various watering and by the time I had finished the water level was nearly at the top. I tested to make sure the ball cock worked, which it did. I wasn’t sure why the tap was turned off, and I didn’t want to wait for it to fully fill before I left, so I turned it off just in case. At least now, it is mostly full up again.

I planted out tomatoes on the plot too, and a couple of pumpkin plants – plus some squash plants still in pots I wasn’t sure what they were. Out of the three cucumber plants, only one is left, the others were eaten by slugs. One of the pot squash plants was a spare cucumber and so maybe with a couple of plants we will still get cucumbers.

The first lot of potatoes are probably ready for digging. I gave them all as much watering as could with a watering can as they all seemed to be suffering a bit from the sun and no rain recently.

Last year I started to make a low fence using old decking planks from the water, but I only got a bit of the way along before the winter came. In the meantime I laid down planks where they would go and they have been there ever since. This afternoon I decided to put the next lot up and so cleared off the weeds and grass, pulled away the old wire fence. It didn’t take too long to do and is another bit of the path cleared and another bit of old fence removed.

From the garden for just today, we picked and used:

• lettuce
• spring onions
• beetroot