What a difference a week makes.

Went walking yesterday in Staffordshire and it was a total washout. We all got absolutely drenched. It was exactly 20degrees C cooler than it was this time last week. British weather eh?

Today has been even worse but at least all of my water butts have got filled up which is handy. In between the showers I took the opportunity to make this rather strange framework over my marrows. All will (I hope!) be revealed during the season as my marrows are trained up and along it so that the developing fruits hang down and get an even green colour all round, with no damage to the skins.

My parsnips continue to please the eye although as ever I have to watch out for those bloody aphids.

My first tomatoes have the first flower trusses showing........

.....so I have my home-made liquid feeds ready. Red caps for comfrey (potash) and green caps for nettles (nitrogen) which I will use in rotation with the shopbought tomato feeds. I always start feeding as soon as the first fruit is the size of a pea, watering into the sunken plastic bottles next to each plant.

My potato foliage is a hundred times better than last year's disaster but I will have to keep an eye out on the blight forecast. In anticipation I sprayed them all with Dithane today.

These are my own shallots which have grown much bigger than I have ever got them in the past. These should provide me with the better, more uniform sets as the ones from the Dave Thornton bulbs have, I noticed tonight, only produced about 6 overly large ones, the rest being only average size. They don't seem to have carried on growing as well as my own. I obviously can't grow them as well as he can!

I'm also very pleased with the 'Longor' variety, and will be very interested to see what shape they ripen up into. They will all be lifted in about a fortnight.....more on that then.

And today my first rose came out despite the rain......always a sure sign to me that summer is here.