I have more plants.

So the key job last week was getting them in the ground.

However, I live in London which for the last few days has been in a heatwave. If you don’t live here, I promise that you don’t understand how hellish London is when the temperature goes above 25c. I know if you live in a place where the weather is much more extreme and 25c is a mild and sunny, you’ll think we’re all a bunch of wusses and so be it. Other people have worse weather (a lot of mainland Europe is having unbearable heat too!), I wouldn’t want to be there either but the last week in London has been difficult and we are just not built for it.

So difficult, that watering aside, I didn’t do much work over the weekend. What I have been doing is morning and evening visits.

First in the ground were the winter squash plants. I re-ordered after the first lot died. I’d ordered a bunch. Three each of musquee de Provence, Waltham butternut, Uchiki Kuri, Sweet Dumpling, Buttercup and Trobonchino. Most of them were planted in the squash bed and two in amongst the sweetcorn because if I’m going to disobey planting instructions, I’m ready going to disobey planting instructions!

So far I’ve lost two, I think due to foxes or birds digging in the bed! Which isn’t terrible, I would really like an abundance of squash this year, I missed not having them this winter

So I have friends who are even more uncontrollable in the face of a plant sale and went wild over the last couple of weeks and this is a long way of saying I was given some extra plants! I needed to accommodate them. Six tomato plants (appleberry red, yellow and orange, akoya) , three sweet peppers (Shadow and Lila purple), three padron peppers and two chillies (Santa Fe Grande). The padrons and the sweet peppers went into the polytunnel with the nine snack peppers already in there.

Tomatoes have not traditionally done very well for me in the polytunnel. And I didn’t want the chilli peppers in the same place as them. So I needed to find some space where I had none. So I made a bed!

I also tied up and trimmed the existing tomatoes, harvested the first potatoes and courgettes, picked fruit, weeded the beds and potted on the basil, nine star broccoli, cottagers kale and physalis.

I’ve not done nearly as much as I hoped and im pretty much done for progress for this week, I’m in Southampton today, the office tomorrow, Hampton Court Flower Show on Friday and Sunday is the allotment open day. I am off on Monday so I’ll be working then (at the moment, the BBC is predicting a dull 23c day so I might be able to work without dying of heatstroke!) however I’m just going to carry on doing what I can in the hope that I can made some real progress in August.