The month of May was a wash out.
Then June followed, and just disappeared into thin air.
Filled with trips and friends and swimming and art.
The allotment suffered as it was always, ‘we will go tomorrow’ until it was yesterday and we went after the football.
We tended to the weeds between the onions, Rosie completely not helping by lying flat on the shallots.
Earlier in the day I had been given some courgette and sweetcorn plants, so they got planted too.
At home I now have tomatoes, cucumbers and salad leaves. The gardening mojo is coming back. Like an old friend who you fell out with. We are ironing out the disagreements and finding a way of making it work for both of us.
Fruit to be picked now - not sure if these are Loganberries or Tayberries, but they are ready and delicious. The cherries, as always, have been lost to the birds. I hope they enjoyed the feast as the ground is littered with stones.
Fruit almost ready … it has so heartened me to see these blueberries. I thought I had lost all the blueberry plants. They were planted in an old plastic bath tub, filled with ericaceous compost. When the shed burnt down a few years ago, the bath plastic melted and the plants were badly scorched. An example of sometimes just leaving plants alone to do their thing, recover their energy and regrow.
Redcurrants - need I say more.
Medlars, if for nothing else, then for making Mark Diacono’s Medlar Sticky Toffee Pudding. If you need a reason to grow a medlar, eat this pudding and you will be planting one!
Pears, not just any pear but a Warden Pear, grafted from stock at Shuttleworth College, Old Warden. This is a cooking pear, delicious flavour, cooks without falling apart. Excellent in compotes, mincemeat, in fact anything where chunks of apples have a tendency to go too soft.
Apples galore, perfect for paring with the humble blackberry below.
Blackberry, this is a thornless cultivar. Proven to be extremely vigorous and resilient. Loves a hard prune and without the thorns, it is so much easier to manage.
Lastly, and not at the allotment but on the home patio. The mulberry* that I had given up for dead after the extreme heat a few years ago, started showing regrowth last year from the rootstock. Not sure what rootstock it had been grafted on, and if it would actually fruit or be a mulberry - I let it grow. This year we had the tiniest smattering of flowers and then in the last few days berries.
Not enough to quite doing anything with, apart from create the absolute finishing touch to my breakfast this morning.
* If you have never tasted a mulberry, then you should seek one out. They are a rarity to find in the shops. I presume because they fall apart as soon as they are ripe and therefore impractical to transport. The flavour is as if you combined the juiciest of raspberries with the most succulent blackberries.