Feeling hot, hot, hot!

Hello everyone after a few months break!

Sorry for the gap in posts, as those of you with children can imagine, my free time has significantly decreased since the little one's arrival and it's rare I get time to complete essentials, let alone write anything! Still, at least she's growing well, even if not many plants are. :)

A very happy, but not very productive helper!

In complete contrast to my last post, the UK has been having a pretty long heatwave. We haven't had rain in months now and everything is looking pretty sad and dried up. I'd already made the decision to minimise veggie growing this year and I've been feeling very glad of that as watering would be a monumental task!

Sunflowers one of the few plants enjoying the hot, dry summer!

Mostly this year everything is in the polytunnel to make maintenance easier, I just have runner beans outside along with previous plantings.

Runner beans flowering well

A lot of seedlings died when the first intense heat hit us, but we have tomatoes, courgette, cucumbers, kale and squash growing under cover. The cucumber has already delivered well with multiple fruits and we've just eaten our first batch of tomatoes. We also had some raspberries, currants, strawberries and gooseberries from outdoor plants, although these are now looking very sad after such a long drought, I hope they survive...

Baby courgettes coming along nicely

Everything in the polytunnel is growing in woodchip which seems to be working well. I tried it once a few years ago on a smaller scale and thought I'd re-try the experiment with hungrier plants. Even the tomatoes seem to be doing well, so I'm happy with that. Woodchip is pretty good as long as plants are fairly large (it wouldn't be so good for seedlings) as it has good drainage but holds moisture fairly well. As it's not so good for seedlings it means that weeds don't grow as readily so creates less work. Hooray! :)

Cherry tomatoes thriving in the polytunnel

The sudden change from very cold to very hot has meant a lot of animals struggling unfortunately. There have been a fair few dead baby birds in nests which is always sad, but there are a few babies currently thriving in our workshop which is lovely to see.

Hungry babies...

On the subject of babies, having one of my own has made me think about plastic use again, as I'm sorry to say I used more when she first arrived. I gave in to more packaged foods and used disposable nappies. I used mostly eco disposables but although they're better for the environment, they're still not great. Now she's a little older, I'm sometimes (emphasis on sometimes!) finding more time to cook from scratch again and am currently experimenting with reusable nappies. I'll hopefully find time to write a separate bonus post on that before long.

Now I'm keeping fingers crossed for some rain to save the plants and top up our, now empty, water butts!