.Our runner beans were going 'great guns' then I noticed that one of them was heavily covered in black fly - strangely, the others seemed hardly affected.

So, I did a bit of internet research and found an interesting  and easy to make recipe for a mint and garlic spray.

Apparently, blackfly hate the smell of this concoction and give any plants treated with it a wide berth.

I made it up over night and gave all the runner beans a good drenching with it in the morning.

 So far so good. The plant that had loads of black fly on it still looks pretty sickly but the others don't seemed to have become a target.

Monika, our allotment neighbour, gave us two 'small' lettuces - which were most welcome.
Our blackcurrants are coming into their own, as the bushes are filling with delicious, juicy fruit.
​I think we will be returning the favour and offering a punnet or two to our neighbours.

Steve our allotment neighbour kindly gave us some of his spare tomato plants. Triss went over to collect them (and to play with his lovely dog Maisie).

Just couldn't believe it,  when we got over the allotment on Friday morning, the area where the squashes are planted (the squash field) was totally covered in weeds. We just had to take a deep breath and battle on.

Sadly , the courgettes and squashes don't seem to be flourishing as much as I would have liked, hence they haven't covered as much of the ground as I would have hoped, in turn this has allowed the weeds to really take over.  I've been told by a long standing allotment holder  the courgettes etc never really get underway until late June/July, so theirs still hope for them at the moment.

We didn't get very far with the weeding as it started to rain so we decided to go over to the shed and take a break.

 The shed is close to the bee hives and for the first time since we have been going to the allotment we could hear the bees buzzing very loudly, shortly after the heavens opened up and we have a few cracks of lightening and rumblings of thunder.

 On Saturday we were interviewing for the Heritage project and whilst speaking to Peter one of the bee keepers I mentioned how loud the bees had been the previous day - he explained that bees really dislike storms and will often become agitated just before one breaks. This was certainly true on Friday.

On Friday we all agreed that we actually like weeding, which is just as well as it seems there always lots of it to do.

​Having said that we have decided to keep a patch as a meadow area and let it do its own thing. On Friday we spotted a little red butterfly hovering around the area- we think it was a Burnett

 We've started 'fermenting' a bucket of comfrey tea and boy does it pong so it's positioned well away from where we sit.

The rogue broad beans were looking really good but the black fly moved in and they are really very poorly now. We did wonder if being very close to the elephant garlic would help to deter the black fly but no such luck1.