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June is a busy time on the allotment. The nights should now be frost-free, and the days are long, which gives you plenty of time to get on with the jobs that need doing. There are lots of jobs to do, including planting courgettes and runner beans, watering during hot spells and, of course, harvesting.
Here are some key allotment jobs for June.
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Keep on sowing spring onions now and you can expect harvests into autumn. You can sow seeds in small patches or even in containers. If planting now you should be harvesting in early August. In the meantime, you can buy some shallots from a supermarket, plant in a pot. These will provide earlier harvest ahead of your seed sown onions.
Late sprouting broccoli cultivars and calabrese can both be sown now. If sowing directly, be sure to avoid exposed spots, as this’ll make your plants prone to windrock. Firm in brassicas when planting. Cabbage root-fly can enter the roots and ruin your plants. Use environmentally friendly collars around the roots to prevent cabbage root-fly.
An initial feed in the ground of something like Vitax Q4 will get the plants off to a flying start. Regular handfuls of chicken pellets will ensure that you have a bumper harvest. These are rich in nitrogen which is essential for rapid leaf growth and combined with the Q4, your plants will have a good base for plant development and food production.
A weekly top-up Giant Veg Instant Compost Tea will provide over 1.6 billion bacteria to the plants to ensure that the roots have the soil biology for healthy plants.
Our tomatoes are being planted out into a number of different hydroponic systems as well as 4 tomatoes in Sheepswool Tomato compost. Plants growing in this compost, don’t need to be fed. Tomatoes growing in containers will need to be fed with a high potash feed as soon as the flowers appear. We use a number of different feeds and have recently trialed the Vitax, Organic Tomato feed. So far, the fruits are forming and we look forward to making fresh salsa for the BBQ.
Successional sowing of beetroot, radishes and lettuce every fortnight will ensure that you have a healthy harvest for the dinner plate right the way up until late October (Frost permitting) Radish are a fast cropper and are a great starter to get your kids into gardening.
Our First Strawberries have been harvested. Around the strawberries, we used a mulch to minimise the amount of watering as well as increase the size of the fruits. This is possible due to the slow release of organic nitrogen (Sheepswool) and organic potash (Comfrey) contained within the compost.
Protect strawberries by mulching around them with straw. Blackbirds love to nibble at them. Keep birds at bay from your ripening crops by covering with a fabric called Enviromesh.
Keeping on top of the weeds is an important job for June. Now that the soil is drying out, the weed seeds will start to germinate. Weeds will compete with the plants for nutrients in the soil. A simple hoe on a dry day will mean that leaving the weeds on the surface, will allow them to dry out.
With the sudden increase in heat and increased soil temperatures, if you are out at work in the day, it can be difficult to keep on top of watering in the summer. Your recently planted plant will need to be watered in a few times as the roots will just be starting to establish in the ground. This is one of the reasons why we will add water into the planting hole before transplanting out and sowing seeds. This allows the plants/young seeds to search for moisture.
We have attempted to utilise timed watering, where possible, and a simple plant timer linked to a dripper system ensures that the water/feed penetrates deeper into the soil providing more robust plants. The benefits of this approach is that it reduces the amount of time spent hand watering and allows more time to reap the benefits of your harvest.
In the July update, amongst other tips, we will be providing you with advice on growing both soil-grown and hydroponic tomatoes, and hopefully, we will see our first Tomato harvest. I’m not sure if they will leave the greenhouse and get into the kitchen though!
We’ll also provide you with some information on lawn, shrub and hedge maintenance as well as some handy battery-operated tools for hedge cutting from STIGA.
All photos - Credit to Kevin @GiantVeg
