Yesterday was so incredibly hot, in the afternoon I went out the front to gather the pine cones that land on our drive from the neighbours tree (they're great to burn on the bbq) and I spotted this little fella sprawled out trying to keep cool.

Can't say I blame him!

I've given up trying to work in the garden during the day, we get full shade for the whole garden around 6ish. The couple of times I tried to start something during the day, I would feel my shoulders start to fry. Last night, I stayed in the garden till after 9.30. It was bliss!

I was mainly working on the bed with the broccoli and kale. I'd covered the bed because I'd had real problems with cabbage root fly last year. I found out that what they do is they lay their larvae in the soil at the base of young plants and this basically messes up your plant. I thought this would do the job but I couldn't see if the bed was getting enough water so I decided to make some collars.

The idea of the collars is that they stop the larvae from getting into the soil and surviving. My first attempt at collars was from scrap card from cardmaking.

By the end of Saturday, I realised white card wasn't such a good idea as it just reflected the sun which burn't the leaves. Seems very obvious now. Also had my spacing all wrong and needed to put more space between them. Think the heat must of got to me!

So, Sunday evening, I put right my wrongs. Thankfully I had quite a few spare plants so I removed the damaged ones and spaced them better.

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Planted some in another bed too.

I used some liner that was left over from the beds and a cocktail stick to hold it in place. It works!

Looking forward to some rain now.