It's midsummer, and we have not had any rain at all for at least 6 weeks. Everything is parched, especially as the weather has been so hot. There are cracks in the soil that you can lose your hand in. Despite this, and only because I have been watering nearly every day, I have been harvesting a great variety of produce : potatoes (I dug all my Vivaldi a few weeks ago, but still have Sarpo Mira in the ground) courgettes, runner beans, French beans, carrots, lettuce, beetroot, cabbage and broccoli. Broad beans have just about finished - I have left a few pods on to mature for seeds - and peas never really started, despite me sowing them several times. Sweetcorn will be ready in a month or so, as will onions, some of which have already started bending over. Some of the excess produce - broad beans, runner beans - has gone in the freezer, but at the moment we could live on vegetables. There are lots of them, and they are so much better than what you can buy, being ultra-fresh, extremely tasty and grown without artificial inputs.
