More planting

I had another good session at the allotment yesterday, despite the heat. I took up the rest of the trays from the greenhouse that needed planting out, namely the 2nd half of the Chinese cabbage, the purple sprouting broccoli, the Brussels sprouts, the cabbage and a few extra French beans.

I put everything except the beans in the brassica area - not quite everything fit inside the cage, so the last few Chinese cabbage were planted outside. We'll see if they survive on their own! The first lot of Chinese cabbage and pak choi look very happy, so hopefully we'll have a better year for the rest of them too this time.

The French beans I took up from home had got to the point of having small bean pods already, which made me look closer at the ones on the allotment that didn't. Something's definitely been nibbling them round the edges. I remembered that we had some spare netting that we bought last year, so that's now over about a third of the beans. If it's rabbits, I don't think it'll keep them off, but if it's birds, it should do the trick.

The courgettes are ramping up now - I harvested 7 yesterday, with plenty more on the way by the looks of it. We may be overrun with courgettes this year - I hope David really likes the taste!

The raspberries are definitely not happy this year. There are far fewer canes than previous years, and the raspberries are mostly very small and not very juicy. The former problem is, I think, because we haven't been managing to keep on top of the weeds, so Mark's ideas about digging it all up and replanting should go a long way towards sorting that out. The latter problem is probably just due to the dry weather we've been having. There's rain forecast for this week, though, so we may yet get a few juicier berries.