If you like your weather blazing hot with no cooling breezes and a cloudless sky from dawn until dusk, well good luck if you are sunbathing on a beach somewhere. With similar weather here, over the past fortnight, gardening tasks on my plots have been more pleasant, either early on a morning or later in the day out of the searing heat of the sun. With quite a few planting, sowing, weeding and re-organizing tasks still to complete on my plots, utilizing mornings and evenings only, has really been out of the question. Air temperatures over the past fortnight have been around the 17C/20C outdoors and into the 30C + ranges inside poly tunnels and greenhouses. With frequent breaks and some welcome shelter from the sun either in my sheds or beneath the hedgerow at the lower end of my plots, various tasks have been carried out using as little effort as possible. Work on the 4 small beds on N2 Plot (converting them into 2 beds) has stopped for the time being, mainly due to the now hard ground, being difficult to dig. In fact the 4 small beds will now be converted into 1 larger bed with the wooden edging being removed from around the original beds and disposed of. Work has started on the area of N1 Plot, where I will eventually erect a fruit cage, with the removal of the grass path which was situated between my currant bushes and the adjacent strawberry bed.
Most of my main seed sowing has been completed, (except for successional sowing to be done over the coming weeks). Most vegetables, planted out from pots/trays are faring well but smaller seedlings sown directly into the ground are suffering from the persistent heat along with attacks from flea beetles. One example is my asparagus plants which have died back completely 3 or 4 times to date, then re-grown, after persistent watering. I currently have 9 large water butts, along with 2 large water tanks and 1 bath, (a shower would be good) situated around my plots, all of them, apart from 2 barrels, have been depleted of their rainwater recently and the largest of the tanks has been re-filled twice in the past 2 days, utilizing the water from the drainage ditch at the lower end of my plots. Just chuck in a bucket with it's handle tied to a piece of rope and when it's full haul it out. Later this coming week I will be using a submersible pump to do the work for me, and into the future if this hot dry weather continues, which I suspect it will. Lo and behold the parsnip seeds I sowed into one of my raised beds have finally germinated after 3 months.
Apart from working down my plots I've been using some of my time, most evenings, scouring the internet for various spare parts and accessories for my recently aquired Merry Tiller Titan rotorvator. Production stopped on these machines about 1990, so its not easy to acquire spares etc for them. Blogging and Google +'ing have taken a back seat lately at this busy gardening time of the year. In fact, although I enjoy reading many gardening blogs I will have to cut back on some of the Google+ activity, as my inbox has been choked up with "3rd party" posts, being shared from members who are not in my circles. Nothing personal but 300+ emails a day is too time consuming to deal with.
A different aspect in some of the photographs (where its cooler).
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| A Sea of Flowers |
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| Lavender Attracting Pollinators for My Fruit |
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| Cool Under the Hedgerow |
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| Cool Under the Grapevine |
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| Cool Under the Runner Beans |
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| Cool Under the Rhubarb |
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| Cool Under the Frog |
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| Cool Under the Potato Plants |
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| Time to Go Home |
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| Ladybirds?? Cool |
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| Cool Under There |
Where did that frog come from?
ReplyDeleteThe frog came from Poundland ages ago, not on its own though, I bought it there. It's fitted with a motion sensor and fixed to a post at the top of N1 Plot close to the allotment road. It croaks when it detects any movement so I can usually hear it if anyone passes by whilst I'm working further down my plots.
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