The weather in June was gorgeous for taking Ruby on long walks at Temple Newsam, Rothwell Park and Nostell Priory. A few days were particularly warm and we decided on evening walks for Ruby once the heat of the day had died down. Indeed this June turned out to be the warmest since I started keeping records in 2010.

However, despite having the highest average June temperature, the warmest June day is still held by 27 June 2011 when the temperature reached 31.6°C. Our warmest day this June was 28 June when the thermometer reach 29.8°C. The little table below summarises my records for June from 2010 to 2023.

However, at the allotment, it was a different story. It was another very dry June, although we did have marginally more rain than last June. Most of that rainfall came in one wet day in the middle of the month. The lack of rain has meant there’s been plenty of watering to do.

Surprisingly, our winter onions have done well without being watered. They were lifted this week and will be stored at home in the dry, and with a bit of luck they will keep us supplied until our summer onions are ready.

We are going to be very short on plums, greengages and quinces this year. I’d go as far as to say that we’ll have no greengages at all and only a few Victoria plums. Our Marjorie’s Seedling and Oullins gage plum trees are fruitless this year. Luckily one of our gooseberry bushes has produced a decent crop of berries and will help make up for the failure of the plum crop.

Strangely it’s one of our fruit bushes that remains unnetted. The blackbirds and wood pigeons devastate most of the fruit if it’s left unprotected. We’ll soon have to cover the whole allotment in netting or environmesh to keep the ever increasing list of pests at bay.

The next two months are the main harvesting months, so fitting in harvesting, watering and any other jobs that crop up can be tricky but it’s safe to say harvesting has to take priority or there’s no point doing all the watering.

At the moment there doesn’t seem to be much consistency in the weather models regarding us getting some useful rainfall. There is some rain forecast for the middle of next week but the usual outcome is that it will magically disappear from the models over the next few days.