We’ve had lots of lovely downpours this week. I had one white and two orange buckets out and gathered about 9 litres of water.

There were lots of tomatoes to harvest and I was able to rescue most beefsteaks before they actually split. There were only a few Ferline, so the main splitters have finished.

The shed tomato plant and the much smaller volunteer in Bed 11 now have fruit, so maybe I’ll get a few more Ferline at the end of the season. With regard to other volunteers, it’s now confirmed that the vine at the back of the compost heap is yet another gourd, not a magical pumpkin.

I gave the grass edges their very first strim, which worked really well. The edge has only built up at one point on Bed 9, where ants have settled. I smashed up the nest, but I imagine they rebuilt pretty quickly. I then did a full bucket of weeding in the grass. Lots of the weeds were really easy to dig up in the softened earth and some of them had spread over a huge area. Not everything is cleared, but it’s a huge improvement. The strip by the trellis is looking like a nice bit of lawn now.