June in rearview mirror

allotment in june

Last week the stars aligned and both our children left for a three day school trip – for the same three days! That’s something that happens just about never and we were a little overwhelmed by the unusual freedom – two whole evenings to spend as we please! We considered going to a restaurant or seeing a movie – or both?
In the end it turned out that what we really wanted to do was to eat a huge salad for dinner and then go to the allotment and stay extra long. Wild right?
Which is either rather sad or really awesome because it means that what we normally do is exactly what we love doing the most.

Allotment in June
The time on the allotment is pretty relaxed nowadays: besides a little weeding and occasional watering when there is no rain, the most time-consuming task is harvesting – and who would complain about that? We’ve been eating more and more home grown produce this month and if you follow me on instagram, I’ve been sharing harvest pictures regularly. I think it’s so interesting to see how the harvest changes throughout the year. In June it has been plenty of lettuce, broad beans, snow peas, sugar snaps, basil, turnips, edible flowers and chard.

June harvests from the garden
I try to use all available space to the max and often interplant a vegetable with another crop, like here where chard is growing between sweet corn plants. Sweet corn is not a very space efficient crop but the whole family loves it so I like to grow some every year. This way, no space is “wasted”.

sweet corn interplanted with chard
Some beds have already finished and were promptly replanted, e.g. I sowed bush beans after harvesting radishes and leaf mustards. I have tiny leeks ready to plant as soon as the broad beans are finished and another bed will be replanted with kale and broccoli that I have presown at home. They are best planted out in the four-leaf stage and it seems that I nailed the planting this time. I figure you should sow about 4 to 5 weeks before you want to plant out the crop.

broccoli and kale seedlings
At the beginning of the month I planted out my sweet potato plants into a bed covered with landscape fabric. In theory the black fabric will warm the soil and provide a little extra warmth for the plants. It is my first time trying to grow sweet potatoes so fingers crossed there will be anything to harvest at the end of the summer. Has any of you have experience with growing sweet potatoes? Would love to hear any tips!

sweet potato plant
In our edible forest backyard garden we are picking a lot of berries. Raspberries literally hang above our head when we step out of the house. I like to go outside in the morning and pick a handful of berries to add to my morning muesli.

berries in june

Between the perennial vegetables, day lily “Pardon me”is flowering. Day lilies are perhaps the most useful perennial edible flowers and besides adding them to salads, they are big enough to be filled.

good king henry, day lily "Pardon me, fennel
After I took out the spring bulbs (you can see tha planting in this post) from the large container on our terrace I replanted it with a polyculture of 3 sweet corn plants which each support climbing beans, 1 tomato “Losetto”, 1 sweet basil, 1 purple basil and nasturtiums. There is also one leaf mustard volunteer plant in the front. The container is already pretty full and the different plants look quite ornamental together. So far we have only picked some basil from it, but hopefully more harvest is to come.

edible container garden

edible polyculture in a container
Happy gardening to you all and if you would like to see what the garden looked like last year in June, look here. (I just realized how similar the first photo is – fun!)

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