There’s the possibility of pumpkins ahead, with a few fruits forming. Hopefully they won’t fall off. Something is still running circuits through the straw. I don’t think a blackbird would be making a pattern like this. I dug up a few weeds from the bed and discovered that the soil beneath the straw is pretty damp. So it’s worked well so well.

The French beans and runner beans are now showing their first beans. The runners have blackly, but I’m just trying to spray and squash as many as possible.

The two cucumber plants that went in as seedling are looking really strong. They look very different from the former strong seedlings I grew at home. Clearly direct sowing is the answer and some of the seeds I sowed as backup are now showing. Might we actually get some cucumbers? 

I gave tomato feed to the tomatoes, beans and pumpkins. The sweetcorn is catching up, but is still behind. I’ve given it some more general feed. The tomatoes by the shed were leaning because their fence was too far away, so I shuffled the fence in a bit and only lost a couple of  tomatoes in the process.

The everlasting peas on back fence have now caught up and are flowering well. A lot of the plant has gone over the fence next door though. I wish I had a walled garden. 

I’ve chopped down all the flowers on the annoying orange geum and it looks so much better already. The plant needs dividing, but I might just replace it with a red one anyway. 

The verbenas have now opened, along with blue cornflowers, so there’s a new splash of colour at the front of the allotment. The verbenas are often at the front of the beds though, so they’re good but with a caveat. One of the verbena plants has a weird twisted stem, but it’s not clear why. I kind of want to dig up my boundaries and reset them all, but that’s not really practical.