In flower

Well, the broad beans are in flower, and there are about 10 flowers on the strawberry plants, so we may even get the strawberries. The potatoes are doing well - I must check on the right time for earthing up - and there are even some microscopic leek seedlings that are fighting their way through the weeds. Best of all, nobody had stolen my storage box or any of its contents.

However, the nettles are back with a vengeance, thistles and dandelions are up in the cleared bits of the patch, and the grass is growing long all round the plot. I took my shears with me to attempt to sort this out, but they are completely blunt. I did pull up a few square feet of nettles, and bear the scars on my forearms. I'm going to try to go up a couple of times during the week after work and do battle with the nettles - in any case, I forgot to bring back the shears for sharpening.

As well as scraping up weeds, I put another, 2m x 1m, raised bed in. I took the Gardener's World advice to line the bottom with cardboard to help suppress weeds. I suspect the local weeds are not to be deterred by cardboard, but it cannot hurt.

At home, the runner and French bean seeds have done well and have been potted up, and I've sowed courgette seeds. The new raised bed will be a home for these once they've been hardened off. I have my free BBC seeds to plant, too, which I ought to do today if we want any tomatoes at all. I need to find a way of covering the paths that doesn't involve financial outlay - cardboard weighed down with stones, maybe? - so that I don't need to keep weeding them.