Sunday 15 June 2014
Backlog Building Up
Sunday was another let down weather wise with a dull damp morning with rain at times followed by a drier but equally dull afternoon.
We had planned to get a little bit of tilling done on the plot and our newly installed coldframe planted up with tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers but the weather put that on hold. We’ve quite a backlog building up now of “stuff” that’s ready for planting out but hasn’t a home in cultivated ground ready for it.
Various varieties of tomatoes hanging on but need to find a home soon.
Lettuce (red salad bowl and little gem) with cucumbers (burpless tasty green) awaiting a spot
Latest sowing of annuals ready for moving on into the plot
Sweet corn and sunflowers wait in the cold frame for their move to the plot.
I reckon that I’ve got to get some ground sorted out for this backlog this week or the plants will really start to suffer from becoming pot bound. I do need the weather to cooperate a bit better though.
Monday 16 June 2014
Tricky Digging On a Getting Better Sort of a Day
Monday morning wasn’t too promising and it looked like another cloudy day was on the cards. At least it didn’t rain and although it was still cloudy at lunchtime we headed for the plot. Our main tasks for the day were to plant up the coldframe with peppers and tomatoes and dig over a bed ready to plant out our sweet corn. We took some cucumber and sunflower plants to the plot to plant out too.
The bed for our sweetcorn is earmarked as our new strawberry bed. I’m anticipating planting our strawberries next spring so anything planted in this bed needs to be removed by autumn so that the bed can be prepared ready for our new strawberry plants next spring. This bed is badly affected by club root as we found out last year when we lost all our winter brassica crops.
Digging the ground to a fork depth you can see just how wet the soil is as the fork left smooth shiny grooves in the soil as it’s dug. I experimented by digging a small patch of ground over with a fork but didn’t bother trying to break down the large clods that resulted. I then used the tiller to break down the soil which seemed to work well and I knew the ground was dug to a least a fork’s depth to avoid a pan layer.
Once dug over with the fork the bed looked like this. I wouldn’t fancy my chances of breaking this lot down to a fine tilth with a rake and there is no chance of planting into soil in this condition. The tiller was put into action. It took a couple of passes but the soil was soon broken down and made into a suitable tilth for planting.
This is how the bed looked back on April 26th when the old brassica plants and the weed control fabric had been removed. Since then we’ve had plenty of rain and the bed has been waiting to be dug over ready for a summer crop.
Regular followers will know that I’ve been complaining about how wet the soil is down on the plot. I was hoping it had dried out enough to till one bed ready to plant out our sweet corn later this week. I was sort of out of luck with the tilling. The top few inches had dried out and tilled okay but the tiller didn’t want to go any deeper and I was going to finish up with a hard pan a few inches down.
The bed still needs edging and covering with weed control fabric but weather permitting we should be able to get our sweet corn planted this week. The bed to the right in the above photo also needs digging and it’s funny how misleadingly dry the soil looks but I’m guessing it will be just the same, pretty wet and claggy beneath the top few inches and will need digging over with a fork before tilling.
By the time we left the plot in the late afternoon it was nice and sunny and certainly the best part of the day. The coldframe had been planted up with peppers and tomatoes and the cucumbers and sunflowers had been planted out too.
Tuesday 17 June 2014
Potato Disaster!!!!
We set off for the plot to plant out our sweet corn on another cloudy and dry day.
I didn’t even bother having a quick look around the plot as I normally do just getting straight on with the task of covering the bed tilled on Monday with weed control fabric and barrowing over some rather “fresh” horse manure to hold down the edges. I’m sure it will be okay to dig this in next spring to improve the soil.
As it turned out I was a little bit premature thinking the sweet corn was ready to plant out as the roots hadn’t yet filled out the pots and transplanting wasn’t going to be so easy. We decided to leave the plants to grow on for a few days before having another attempt to plant them out.
So we decided it was coffee time. I collected the kettle from the shed and headed down the path to the tap. As I passed our early potatoes Rocket and Casablanca I had to do a double take. I didn’t believe what I could see. Never mind the coffee for the moment this was far more serious.
I’m pretty sure that our potatoes have “early blight”. It’s not something we’ve suffered from for a few years now but when our potatoes have had it in the past it’s started in early August not in the middle of June. If all our potatoes succumb now I doubt we’ll have much of a crop.
The most common advice is to remove the foliage to stop the blight spores falling onto the soil and then infecting the potatoes underneath. Apart from our Rocket and Casablanca varieties which are just coming into flower our second earlies won’t have potatoes forming yet as they aren’t anywhere near the flowering stage.
Will it affect all our potato crop and will find our tomatoes in the greenhouse and coldframe? Will the weed control fabric that some of the affected potatoes are growing through offer some protection to any tubers that have formed?
Now all we can do is wait and see what happens.
Wednesday 18 June 2014
Plugs v Grow Your Own
After a bit of a dull start Wednesday was a gorgeous June day with some long sunny spells and the temperature up to 24.9°C by late afternoon making it the warmest day of the month.
I thought it would be worthwhile to write a post about our bought in brassica plug plants. Our brassicas that should have over wintered to produce some springs greens succumbed to club root. This meant a rather long wait until our spring sown seeds produced some tasty cabbages, cauliflowers and calabrese. Like you do I saw some brassica plants advertised by Marshalls suggesting their plug plants would produce an early crop. I’ve had mixed results in the past with plug plants but in the end I decided to give these a go. Previous posts referring to our plants can be found here and here.
The cabbages “Duncan” and calabrese “Marathon” grew away well when planted out on the plot and we are now harvesting the last of the cabbages.
These have certainly given us a much earlier crop than if I’d relied on my self sown seedlings which are only now starting to form hearts.
These are my “Hispi” cabbages which will be a few more weeks before they are ready for cutting. All the cabbages have been badly ravaged by slugs but luckily nearly all the damage has occurred to the outer leaves leaving the hearts in good condition and 100% usable.
The calabrese is now forming decent sized heads and will be ready to use over the next few weeks as the cabbages are finished.
Now whilst the cabbages and calabrese from the Marshalls collection grew away well when they were initially transplanted into pots and given some tlc the cauliflowers were a different matter altogether. They refused to grow much at all and were eventually transplanted out several weeks after the other plug plants. However, now they are looking much healthier and much more likely to go on and produce some cauliflowers.
These are cauliflowers “Mayflower” grown from our plug plants and looking pretty good.
Compared to my seed sown cauliflowers “Clapton” they’re miles ahead.
So I’d have to agree that those Marshalls plug plants have definitely produced much earlier crops than I’ve been able to manage from my spring sowings.
Obviously the cost of buying in plug plants is much more expensive than raising your own plants from seed but I’ve no idea whether or not I’m in pocket or not after harvesting my cabbages, calabrese and cauliflowers.
I might even consider buying in a few cauliflower plug plants to plant in autumn to over winter and produce a crop in May next year.
These rather scrawny looking plants received on the 23 March have grown extremely well and turned into the excellent plants shown below.
Thursday 19 June 2014
RHS Harlow Carr’s Roses
We set off for a visit to RHS Harlow Carr near Harrogate just before lunchtime. It had been a dull morning and it started to rain lightly as we set off.
My favourite is the first one “Shropshire Lass” a climbing rose. It’s on my wish list at any rate.
Luckily that was the last of any rain we saw and the day cleared as we headed into North Yorkshire. We managed some very pleasant sunny spells in the afternoon as we had a leisurely stroll around the gardens.
These are my best pictures of some of the roses on flower at Harlow Carr.
Friday and Saturday 20/21 June 2014
Blighted New Potatoes
Friday and Saturday were both pleasant June days with reasonable amounts of sunshine and continuing mild and dry.
Saturday was taken up with a visit to the Esk Valley in the North Yorkshire Moors National Park but more of that another day once the photo’s and video are developed.
I haven’t yet come to terms with our potatoes succumbing to blight in June. That initial panic of we aren’t going to have any potatoes at all this year is beginning to dispel a little.
Sue’s posting on her blog gives more details of blight and our problems this year. Having decided it was best to remove the infected foliage on Friday it left some of our potatoes without tops at all. It seemed like a good idea to dig a root of foliageless Winston potatoes to see if we did have any potatoes underneath. They haven’t flowered yet so I wasn’t really that hopeful but I couldn’t help thinking about those volunteers that get left often have a few usable size potatoes on.
These are the potatoes from the root of Winston. They weighed in at 0.5kg so not too bad and better than nothing at all. They cleaned up very well too.
Given a good washing under the tap the skins started to come away without any scraping at all. Most surprisingly there was no sign of slug damage and slugs normally find Winston one of my tastiest varieties. Perhaps the slugs have been too busy eating the above ground greenery to bother with the underground stuff. Well they’re missing a treat as these few new potatoes tasted superb eaten with our salad.
If it hadn’t been for the blight we wouldn’t have dug any potatoes for a few weeks so we’d have missed out on this tasty treat. I still can’t really come to think of blight having a silver lining though.