At Last Some Rain - Now To Start Clearing the Backlog

I haven't added a lockdown day as it seems it's ended judging from the thousands of people joining protest marches around the country!

After going something like two and a half months without any useful rain the last few days have seen persistent showers bringing a reasonable amount of rain. It's amounted to a total of 20.2mm (0.8in) by Sunday morning.

Temperature & Rainfall Records 31-05-2020 to 06-06-2020

All the rainfall has come as showers but it's amounted to enough to make a full blue column which is the amount we might expect in the course of an average week. At the allotment progress on getting summer crops planted out had ground almost to a halt as more time was taken up with watering and beds were so dry that any planting out we did do took much longer than normal. The result is we have a backlog of plants at home desperate to be planted out before they spoil.

First on the list is a batch of brassicas which include cabbages, Red Lodero, Kilaton, Kalibro, and Cabbice to hopefully keep us supplied into winter. Then there's broccoli Monclano and cauliflower Clapton both of which should be ready to harvest late into summer or early autumn. At least we have the ground prepared and covered with environmesh ready for planting out.

Next on the list will be our runner beans Enorma and Moonlight together with our climbing French beans Cobra and Sunshine. We've still to erect the frames for these beans to climb up, but before the rain, the ground was so hard pushing supports into the ground was almost impossible. Hopefully, the rain will have softened the ground making the job of erecting the supports much easier and quicker.  

Also waiting at home are two varieties of sweetcorn Swift and Earlibird. The ground where these will be planted out has already been dug over so once again I'm hoping that it won't take too long to get these plants into the ground. 

Following on from the sweetcorn will be our courgettes and winter squash.

The varieties of courgette are Defender and Orelia. This year we are trying Crown Prince, MusQuee De Provence, and Uchiki Kuri as our varieties of winter squash.

Then all we need to do is get our tomato plants into their final pots in the home and plot greenhouses.

That will more or less clear our backlog of vegetable plants but somewhere in amongst planting out all these vegetables we've got to find time for planting out some sweet peas and sunflowers. We could do to get some more peas sown too. It might be a busy week coming up providing the weather doesn't thwart us.

Copyright: Original post from A Gardener's Weather Diary http://ossettweather.blogspot.co.uk/ author M Garrett