Plot 35: Biggest harvest from the new plot to date

I had a day to myself today to catch up on some chores and to treat myself to some gardening. Last weekend, I focused on our front garden at home and carved out a new bed (7x0.8m roughly). It was tough getting the turf off of such dry ground and even forking over the patch was hard-going. I under-estimated the task but it gives us more scope for a sunny bed because the opposite bed is shaded by next door's hedging. So today, I started populating it with the Mediterranean herbs from the other bed, and the fig plant which was sitting in a pot in the back garden and not fruiting. I am hoping that the new location against a south-facing wall, albeit sheltered to the east by our house, will make it happy and get it in the mood for fruiting.

I did get some time over at the plot in the afternoon. It was warm - about 23 Celsius. The priority was to put some sort of barrier around the sweetcorn in an effort to put the badger off. Two of the bits and pieces left on the plot when I took it on looked promising. Someone had taken two sheets of plastic netting and attached thin planks along both ends of them. Each plank was about a metre high so I cut them all in half leaving me with four pieces of netting with short planks at the ends. I could then use them to form a boundary around 3 sides of the sweetcorn patch, keeping them upright and in place with bamboo canes. The fourth side of the patch is covered by the courgette plants so it shouldn't be a problem that the netting doesn't extend that far. Fingers crossed. Some of the plants have cobs starting to grow nicely so the badger will come round soon.

The mange tout flowers look stunning (not that you'd know it from the photo below) and a closer inspection revealed a small handful of purple pods that were ready to pick. Obviously, I tried one. Sweet and crispy.