As I’ve stated in the title the allotment plots are all now planted up. There are a few more brassica plants to go in to fill up one bed to hopefully provide us with a successional crop of cabbages and cauliflowers. However, you’ll notice the but at the end of the title and that’s because the allotment is very dry. It’s a month since we had any rain.

There’d be a full blue column showing around 40mm of rainfall in an average June but as you can see the total for the last month is zero.

It’s not just the plot that’s showing signs of lack of rain, the area known as the Pastures in Rothwell where we take Ruby for a walk is showing how the lack of rain is drying out the grass.

Fortunately, it doesn’t bother Ruby.

The dry weather does come with some good and bad points. The good ones are that it’s easy to plan what you are going to do. There’s no “we’ll do this providing it’s not raining” because that hasn’t happened in the last month. However, on the downside, it means we have to spend lots of time watering the allotment. Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve spent time watering and planting and the more planting that takes place the more watering there is to do. The result is that weeds have taken over in places on the plot and we hadn’t noticed.

Part of our apple hedge had been taken over by goose grass without us noticing. I’ve now pulled out as much of the stuff as I can. I had a large pile to take to the compost heap.

The blueberry bushes had also become inundated with weeds whilst we were busy doing other things. As the bushes have set fruit it is imperative that they are netted or the blackbirds and wood pigeons will clear the crop.

The base of the bushes has been strimmed so at least it’s possible to get in to net the fruit.

Although it’s been dry it hasn’t been particularly mild and we’ve had a couple of nights down to 6°C, pretty cool for the start of June.

The reason it has felt on the cool side is that we’ve had a continuous north-easterly breeze for what seems like the last few weeks. That’s all due to end this week as the breeze moves into a southerly direction bringing us some hot and humid air. 

There’s even talk of thunderstorms which will be good for the allotment but they are not very evident in the forecast above. We’ll have to see if the weather forecast turns out to be correct. It certainly looks like next week will see the warmest day of the year so far.