Summer seems to have arrived and last week was hot. So the first thing we did on Saturday was water everything. We’d bought saucers for the blueberries (some of them, I ordered six but I have eight large blueberry bushes). I will buy some more for the others too.

Post watering, we sorted out the garlic and put it in the poly to continue to dry out. We have one more bed of garlic which I hope to get to next week!

We also brought things over to plant up and sort out. We up potted three lemon scented geraniums (which I know are actually pelargoniums but everyone calls them geraniums) and four spider plants, all cuttings/babies from plants at home and I don’t need anymore so they can go to the allotment plant stall in July!

I also decided it was time to deal with the mystery summer squash, they are a mystery because I resowed them and didn’t label them. I think most of them are early prolific straight neck and or courgettes, green bush I think! Eight of them went straight into beds (yes that is a little overcrowded but I’m not sure they’ll all make it and I had them). Two really lovely looking ones went into pots and are in the polytunnel, when they’ve got a big bigger, I’ll plant them into the last bed that’ll have summer squash. The other four went into pots and will go to the plant sale.

Finally, we planted up the new strawberry plants. I ordered them from DT Brown and have never had any issues, this time, there were issues. The delivery company said they had been delivered, they had not been delivered, the driver swore blind he had delivered them but couldn’t produce a photo. After I reported it, they arrived two days later, looking like this…

They were looking in a fairly sorry state but we did what we could. I’m hoping that by the end of summer I’ll have enough runners for another 30 plants. The plan is that every year we have 41 new plants until I have ten towers. Then at year five we can renew the towers from year one. Ma did have a very good question about where are going to put them all! I’m going to move the square beds at the front, where the courgettes are this year (it’s a winter project). They’ve never done brilliantly, and we can find room for them elsewhere on the plot so I’ll move one this year and one when we run out of room for strawberries.

Also this week, we ordered a new table for the plants that need more sun than the tables at the back get. I also got to some of the grass on the side path by the shed, the tomatoes are doing a lot better and the extra peppers I ordered, arrived damaged, I think they turned the box upside down because two of them were uprooted! They are being replaced but I also got three from a fellow plot holder who had too many, one red, one yellow and one chocolate, so that should be fun. The jalopenos arrived this week too (completely unscathed) so I should be able to plant the pepper bed up entirely on Friday, which is good because the slugs got all the lunchbox peppers!

We are also getting strawberries and the start of blueberries, it’s an exciting time…