June Week 1: crops and planting out

Finally there are some crops. Spinach, lettuces, radishes and early strawberries are in abundance.  Probably a good thing as apparently food prices are still on the up.

I've begun to plant out courgettes and pumpkins. Surely there won't be a frost now! I've followed Monty Don's advice and planted some of them in the middle ot the bean wig wams. Apparently this will make watering easier as they're all thirsty.

Mr Middleton wants me to watch out for onions seeding. I can't see any evidence of this, probably due to the earlier lack or rain. At least they're starting to bulk up with last week's downpours. Luckily Mr Middleton says not to plant too many leeks now as they're better a bit later in the year. That's an advantage as mine are currently too spindly and half the onion bed is under plastic to suppress the weeds. It's the last bit!

I'm almost on track with the celeriac if I can just make the time to plant it out. (He says end of May, but, this is the north so I think first week of June will be fine). My celery is fine to plant out in June, but, apparently I should have made trenches in the winter, oh. I'm meant to dig an 18 inch deep trench and leave it for weeks. I'm planning on digging a spit deep trench and leaving it for a fortnight, then I fill to two inches from the top with manure. My previous celery has only been stock-worthy so here's hoping this might be an interesting experiment that makes some fit for the plate.

Mr Middleton says: 'Keep records of successes and failures and avoid the same old mistakes year after year' So at least he's encouraging me to attempt to improve on previous performances. We'll see.