Friday, 09 August 2019
What's This?
I do my best to try and label up all our vegetables from when they are first sown to when they're planted out in the allotment. However, every now and again things do go wrong especially in the hectic planting out periods.
Imagine my surprise then when I found the specimen above growing in a patch of brassicas labelled as Clapton cauliflowers. Obviously, it isn't a cauliflower at all and as I haven't planted any calabrese or broccoli in this bed that I would expect to be ready for picking in August I immediately though that the seeds must have been incorrectly labelled. The patch of brassicas planted up as cauliflowers didn't look to be growing all that much like cauliflowers in any case.
The plants are all growing far too tall to be cauliflowers. I had a quick look at the plants growing next to these plants and they looked far more like I'd expect cauliflowers to look.
These cauliflower like plants were labelled up as Rudolph and I didn't give the matter any more thought at the plot as I was more interested in tidying up the bed and getting the environmesh cover back over the plants.
Once back home I gave the problem a bit more thought and I seem to remember sowing a broccoli called Rudolph. I checked back through my records and found this picture taken on the 06 May.
Sown on the same day cauliflower Clapton and broccoli Rudolph. Obviously the labels got mixed up when the plants were planted out. The only question now is why is Rudolph producing heads so early when it should be producing heads when autumn arrives?
Monday, 12 August 2019
A Stormy Weekend
The forecast promised a stormy weekend and that's what we had. Saturday saw the worst of the storm with gale force winds developing on Saturday afternoon and lasting well into the evening.
Temperature & High Wind Speed Records 09-11 August 2019
The highest wind speed recorded in our garden at plant level on Saturday evening was 27.0 mph which is equal highest with 11 August 2014. These are the only two occasions over the last 10 years that we've had such strong gusts of winds in August. Fortunately we didn't have any heavy rain associated with the storm.
We did manage a trip to the plot, to do a little bit of harvesting and tidying up, on a very windy and showery Saturday afternoon. Eventually, we got fed up with having to make hasty retreats into the shed to avoid the showers and headed for home.
Potatoes Vivaldi on the left and Winston on the right
During the afternoon, I dug up a couple of rows of potatoes which for some reason or another hadn't grown particularly well and while the crop on Vivaldi wasn't too bad, the same couldn't be said for Winston. Many of the potatoes on Winston were pest damaged and some roots hadn't produced any potatoes at all. We will probably be replacing Winston with one of our more successful trial varieties next year.
The forecast for the next week to ten days is for the weather to remain unsettled and after a rather milder than average start to August the temperature is set to fall. Autumn seems to be on its way already.