I had a fab time in Berlin. The lovely people we were staying with showed me allotments on the old Tempelhof airfield, Prinzessingarten & Dreieck so I can see how the Germans do it..

While I was away it looks like something (a fox?) has had a good roll around in my spuds. 3-4 rows looking very unhappy. Have watered and am now crossing my fingers that will be useful for setting them upright again. There are very clear fox-sized pawprints on the other side. I spent what seemed like ages constructing baling twine & bamboo defences and hopefully that will both give the plants a bit of space to possibly recover and keep the fox from jumping in the rest of the rows.

Squashed lots of slugs who were feeling lucky, but weren’t. And after a fair bit of complicated maths and many sit-downs to ponder, the green bed has been moved across a bit, and the navy one is mostly up alongside it. Both sopping wet so no digging yet again. I am planning to mattock these into submission and double dig later in the year. The slope on the plot is making it very difficult to get the beds and paths approximately level with each other.

Allotment mojo is back. I’d got a bit deflated last week with many things going wrong. The horsetail advance has made it into the path between mine and my neighbour’s plot. I do want to ask her to keep the bordering beds clearer of the knee-high weeds, but I also don’t want to be an annoying neighbour or a drama queen about it. The rest of the Committee don’t think that it’s really a problem, but their field doesn’t have it and they aren’t over often to look at our side.

In better news the replacement achocha look like they are about to break through and also the Aeron runners – my first runner beans. I have my first ever lettuce seedlings (little gem) to prick out into pots and my sage seedlings are looking happy.

Harvested a good amount of stuff – broad beans, nasturtiums, mint, strawberries and redcurrants. The harvest value so far this year is £50.30 on waitrose basic prices.

Rain started at 7, so I pegged it home on my trusty bike. Listening to it yammering down now, I hope the poor flattened spuds aren’t taking too much of a bruising.