Great plant offers at

Suttons – discounts on plant collections

Senetti Collection
£8.95 or Buy 2 Get 1 FREE
Flowers earlier than the average bedding plant!

Senetti has amazing flower power, producing up to 200 individual blooms per plant at any one time. The vivid magenta bi-colour, blue and intense magenta flowers will brighten up the cloudiest of days. They are the perfect plants to provide strong colours to brighten your pots and patio containers before the summer displays come into full bloom. What’s more, after the first flush of flowers is over, you can simply trim them back and they’ll bloom again in a matter of weeks. Can be grown indoors or outside.

Delivered as Pot Ready Plants
Code: 209171 – 6 Pot Ready Plants-
Code: 209161 – 18 Pot Ready Plants – £17.90

Onion, Shallot & Garlic Collection
Only £9.95 – Save over 15%!
The essential kitchen ingredients

Onion & Shallot sets are immature bulbs in an arrested stage of growth so that they start to grow quickly when you plant them, rarely being attacked by pests or diseases. Garlic is so easy to grow, simply plant a clove and it grows to form a plump garlic bulb.

Delivered as 400g of Shallot Red Sun and Onion Centurion & 2 bulbs of Garlic Arno Code: 174045

Spring Bedding Plant Collection
60 Plants for just £12.95!
A splash of colour

Bellis is sometimes called the Spring Daisy and this mixture comes in shades of red, rose, white and a rose bicolour; Stock Hot Cakes is a sweetly scented mix, with colours from blue through to pink and white. And no bedding collection is complete without Pansies which contain an enormous variety of single and blotched face colours!

Delivered as 60 Easiplants, 20 each of Bellis Mix, Pansy mix and Stock Hot Cakes
Code: 209181

Picking the raspberries that are ripening now. Watch out for the damsons ripening up – they make good jam although it takes effort to stone them!

Green Manure : Fast Growing Soil Conditioner (Seeds) You could grow some of this and put it on bare soil where you’ve removed a crop recently. It grows quickly and covers the soil and is then dug in to provide organic material!

Sow Winter Jem lettuce now – Lettuce : Winter Gem (January-May) (Seeds)
Little Gem Cos for sowing from September to January and for growing in a unheated greenhouse or in a cold frame for overwinter production (not suitable for growing outdoors).
Try a new broccoli! Brassica : Petit Posy Mix™ (Seeds)nteresting British breeding, a cross between the Kale and Brussels Sprouts species producing ‘rosettes’ of loose frilly edged buttons on a long stalk, in purples, greens and bicoloured leaves. Quite pretty really!

New TY&M exclusive!
Onion : Supasweet™ (Dulcinea) F1 Hybrid (Seeds)
The large semi-globe, copper-skinned bulbs of Onion Supasweet™ are so sweet and juicy they can be eaten raw providing you with a full range of health benefits including vitamin C and the antioxidant, quercetin. Not one for long storage but good for eating and will be lovely in salads!

We didn’t put our carrots in tubs. But maybe we should have done. It appears an awful lot of people on our allotment site plant their carrots in containers. There’s someone with three huge dustbins packed full of them. I’m not sure how big they get – but I’m going to be there when he pulls them up!

Here’s some in a washing up bowl! It’s not a hugely deep container – but they’ve certainly done better than our carrots which seem to be buried in the chickweed!

At least I think they’re carrots! They certainly look like them to me!  If they’re not – then please get in touch and tell me what they are!

Allotment was damp and cold this morning but busy. Our weeds are causing a nusiance and my other half has finally ordered a petrol strimmer which should be here on Wednesday – so he’ll be reviewing it then! And I’ll also show you some photos hopefully of our tidier plot!

We’ve got plenty of pea flowers, broad beans flowering nicely and the runner beans have started budding their pretty red flowers too!

The tomatoes are swelling gently in the relative warmth of the greenhouse and they got fed again today.

The basil is looking more promising and I have stuck some vine stems in a pot of soil in the hope of getting some to root so I can inflict them on friends and family!

The butternut squash at the allotment looks suitable blown about, but the ones at home are looking much better – they’ve been a bit more sheltered from the last days weather and were a bit bigger too. June should be ok for putting everything out, but it’s a bit cold and bleak today.

The onions look great – will definately be doing some different types next year, so maybe two beds of them!

Looking green and healthy – and we weeded this entire bed before we came home – we could sense the rain was coming in and we did get back just in time.

So much chickweed this year it’s quite shocking. Even the tray of plants a friend gave me had some in! So it’s not confined to the allotment plot! I was given some chinese vegetables which I put in the bed with the broadbeans, leeks and a new row of carrots. It’s a very mixed bed – which might or might not be a bad idea yet.

When it’s as hot as it is today there’s a few jobs that definately need doing.

Watering newly planted seeds, and plants that are developing fruit need lots of regular water. Potatoes that are growing need plenty of water too – so don’t forget them!

Hoeing the weeds away when it’s this hot is really effective. The poor things shrivel up and die in the sun – so it’s well worth spending some time doing this where you can.

Chickweed seems to be especially active this year and is everywhere. Several plot holders are blaming it on it being in the compost from last year and are refusing to compost it this year. Old timer Percy is quite happy to accept all compost material donations though – the bigger the heap and the faster it’s put together the more heat it generates and should kill all the seeds.

We’ve filled one side of our double compost bin already. Partly through some old uncomposted stuff being put back in and all the new lovely weeds.

Watered the tomatoes today as usual and added some plant food to the watering can. They’re doing really well – the initial four plants and the extra ones are coming on pretty well too.
We planted out about half the leeks – they were as fat as pencils and getting far too tall so we decided to put them out now. We dibbed holes 5-6 inches deep and put the leeks in. They’d been in pots of compost so we rinsed most of this off to get them into the hole – the book I’d read said nothing about this – but seemed to think you’d just have roots (as did the man on gardeners world!). I’ve not trimmed the roots or tops of them – my book says this old way isn’t really needed.

I also planted out the cucumber plant – I’ve only got one as I know we don’t eat a lot of them. It’s pickling type which should be ok for salads peeled (they’re a bit spiney apparently) and good for pickling! I adore pickles so am looking forward to doing these.

The onions are coming on nicely. Weeded them again today and they’re nearly clear of chickweed. I have very much learnt the need to put them in very straight rows as it makes hoeing so much easier.

A word of advice – wear a hat in such hot weather! and you should put on sunscreen too!