After a hot April and then a cold and miserable May, June just got hotter and hotter and hotter until we hit the low forties. I emptied my 1500 litres of stored water in a matter of ten days, watched my lettuces alternatively bolt or shrivel and gave up sowing any new seeds. I have limited shading for anything sown into seed trays or modules and anything left out in the sun will dry out and die within hours. The risk to seeds sown directly into the ground is getting capped or stuck by a baked hard layer of soil or compost, and any brave seedlings that do make it out through the concrete may not cope with the fierce heat.
On the other hand the tomatoes, peppers, chilies, aubergines have all put on huge amounts of growth and are covered in flowers and fruit.
Pumpkin/winter squash and sweetcorn plodding along in the first week of July 2014. The corn was poor but the squash fed us right through the winter, so all in all not bad.
And this photo was taken the first week of July this year, 2015. The first planted patch of corn is only a few weeks off harvest and underneath all that foliage there are already pumpkins the size of dinner plates. There is no soil to be seen and I've already given up trying to cut the edges of this bed!
But it isn't all good news; the tomatoes may be taller and stronger than last year, but I've failed to keep them well-enough watered and have lost perhaps 25% of the early trusses of Roma and San Marzano to blossom end rot. Hopefully the season will long and blight free and I may recover the losses. I don't like buying tins of tomatoes!
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