Allotment rain, crops and planning

It has rained and rained and rained. On the plus side, we haven’t had to water the beans. On the minus side, digging up new potatoes has been horrible – dashing up to the plot to try and get the spuds out of the ground while it, and we, were relatively dry. And failing, more often than not.

My sweetcorn is still going great guns, or rockets or whatever the proper metaphor should be for corn. I managed to get a good photo between rainstorms, although you can see the clouds gathering for another go at drenching 201 while I’m on it.

My herb garden is looking good too – the dill has gone to seed and I’m hoping to harvest that seed, some for cooking and some for sowing next year, as dill, despite being a perennial, never survives a winter on our exposed area of the south coast. The amaranth (love lies bleeding) looks very pretty too, although I’m a bit puzzled by it: the same seed last year in the garden grew to about three and a half feet, but it seems to have stuck at a much shorter height on the allotment. It could be a sign of poor soil, I suppose, we didn’t do a lot of work on that area before planting it out.
And now, as the chicory and peas are harvested, the radish too, and the beans are coming on in glut proportions, I wonder what we could do with the bare soil left behind the finished crops. The obvious answer is to leave it for a while, especially where the pea roots are, and then dig it over and compost or manure it. But are there any quick crops one can stick into the ground in July?

I’m going to be potting up strawberry runners in the next week though. We’ll keep the current, rather tired, strawberry bed, for another year but start planting out a new one, so that after the harvest of 2010, we can dig up the old one entirely. That’s the plan anyway!