Friday 22 August 2014
A Week of Computer Issues
It wasn’t that good a day for August but we decided on making a visit to Breezy Knees Gardens and Nursery located close to York. The chances were that it might not be the best of days to head in the direction of York. It meant heading in the direction of Bramham Park where the Leeds Music Festival is taking place and the Ebor race meeting at York as well as early Bank Holiday traffic heading along the A64 to the east coast. Luckily we didn’t have any major traffic problems.
The gardens alone were well worth the visit and gave us some good ideas as to what to grow for colour in late August and into September.
What a pity that having spent a couple of hours looking around the gardens photographing and making notes of what we would like to grow these plants weren’t available in the nursery. It’s not the only gardens or show where we’ve discovered something we would like to grow only to find it unavailable to buy. We can’t have been the only ones who didn’t part with any money because having found the star varieties walking around the gardens the nursery didn’t stock them. These plants are available to buy on the Internet so these nurseries seem to be missing out on some sales.
That brings me onto yet another computer issue. I was going to add some photos of the gardens to my Flickr account but for the second time in a few months I am unable to access my account. It’s linked to a BT account which I can access and view all the details of such as payments but it won’t let me look at any pictures. As I mentioned earlier, this is the second time that I have been locked out of my account with no means of rectifying the problem so I think it’s goodbye to Flickr. BT can’t help and can only suggest passing me on to Yahoo who will no doubt blame Flickr. I don’t intend to go down that line.
I have added an album to my Facebook account which can be found here.
Saturday 23 August 2014
Flamenco -
Saturday was another cool August day (I very nearly typed autumn instead of August) with a few sunny spells to a least brighten up the day. Our average temperature for August has now fallen to 15.3°C and into the coldest August over the last five years spot. It still has some time left to make a comeback though.
We still haven’t decided on our strawberry varieties for our new patch to be planted up next spring. We did decide back in the middle of the strawberry picking season that we wouldn’t bother growing an everbearing variety. Flamenco is our everybearing variety at the moment and it didn’t perform very well back in early summer. Who needs poor performing strawberry plants.
For the second week in a row our old Flamenco plants have yielded up a punnet of delicious strawberries. A few fruits had some slug damage and a couple of strawberries had gone mouldy on the plants, not a surprise given the autumnal nature of the weather for the last couple of weeks. I think they’ve now done enough to earn a second chance.
Sunday 24 August 2014
Grapes Galore
Sunday was one of the better days of the last few weeks with some decent sunny spells and the afternoon temperature reaching a very pleasant 19.7°C.
After a rather disastrous year in the home greenhouse last year, things are doing much better this year. Sue posted a greenhouse August update here. One thing I’ve tried to do this year is keep our grape vine Himrod under better control. It produces an large heavy crop of sweet grapes every year but left to its own devices it will fill the greenhouse full of shoots exploring all parts of the greenhouse.
The main stem of the vine is trained along the roof of the greenhouse and the never ending new shoots and leaves can soon cut out much of the light. In hot sunny weather this can produce some useful shade but in duller damper weather it reduces much needed light. This year I was determined to keep it in check if at all possible.
The pruning process has to start early on in the season and the first worry is will the vine produce some grapes if all its new shoots are constantly cut back. As you can see we have no shortage of grapes despite my attempts to stop the vine in its tracks.
My efforts to stop the grape vine taking over haven’t been totally successful as its managed to cunningly send out some tendrils behind the tomato plants where I can’t reach them.
It’s now in need of its weekly trim. I’ll trim back all the shoots leaving a couple of leaves near the main stem of the vine. It should keep us supplied with grapes until the end of September providing we don’t get any really cold nights.
Bank Holiday Monday 25 August 2014
What a Shocker
It’s been a very poor August weather wise so far but I think it saved the worst for Bank Holiday Monday. It turned out to be a very dull cool day with drizzle or light spells of rain all day followed by some heavier rainfall late on into the evening.
With more rain in the early hours of Tuesday morning bringing the monthly total up to 95.2mm it’s made August 2014 the wettest month of the year and it’s the wettest August of the five years I’ve been keeping records.
Bank Holiday Monday’s temperature never really managed much above 13°C and it was even cooler for most of the morning. The result is that the average monthly temperature has now fallen to 15.1°C, the coolest I’ve recorded, and which I think from Met Office records would make it the coldest August since 1993 which had an average temperature of 14.6°C.
Unless we have some exceptionally cold days, which aren’t in the forecast, I don’t think the average will fall to that 1993 temperature.
Tuesday 26 August 2014
Moving Inside
The weather’s been so poor of late that a couple of hours of sunshine on Tuesday afternoon felt like summer had returned. After a cool dull morning the sunshine tempted us out into the garden.
Our apricot “Flavourcot” and Nectarine “Fantasia” have now been moved into the greenhouse in an attempt to stop peach leaf curl fungus attacking the plants. A cause of this can be due to winter rainfall so the trees will have some protection and hopefully some lovely leaves and fruit next year.
Our pot grown apple tree “Baya Marisa” suffered a little bit in the July heat. The pot it was in was a little too small to keep the tree watered so it’s been moved into a much larger pot where hopefully it will be convinced that it’s really growing in the garden.
Looking at the pot in the photo it doesn’t look that large but it’s almost 600mm wide at the top and full of compost it’s not exactly manoeuvrable.
That just leaves our peach tree to move inside the greenhouse and once that is done we will have some space outside for some more potted fruit trees.
Wednesday 27 August 2014
Carrot Inspections
Wednesday was another dull August day but there are rumours about that the weather may pick up a bit next week for a few days only. We shall see.
We’ve had plenty of fresh vegetables from the plot over the last month or so without missing our carrots which have been left to their own devices growing away under their environmesh tent.
The last time I remember looking in the tent our carrots looked like this. We were a bit concerned that slugs had decimated a couple of rows of young carrot seedlings so we made some extra sowings. Since then Sue’s weeded a couple of times whilst the carrots were quite small. Despite using weed control fabric some weeds do grow between the seedlings and the edge of the cut fabric.
I thought it was about time to look inside the tent and see how our carrots had performed.
This is the tent from the outside and apart from looking full of green vegetation there’s not much of a clue as to how our carrots had grown inside it.
Inside was full of lush green carrot tops and not too many signs of any large weeds although I’m sure there will be some in there somewhere. So the only thing left was to carefully move some of the tops aside so I could manoeuvre my fork between the carrots and weed control fabric and lift our first “Early Nantes” carrots of the season.
The first signs were good and a combination of easing roots out with the fork and pulling the carrot top revealed some decent roots. We always get some smallish carrots because, going against all good gardening advice, we never thin out our carrots. Our method works too so I’m not going to change it.
We had one rather enormous carrot and a few medium sized ones together with a few smaller carrots but all of a useable size. A couple of carrots had forked but had done so at the very end of the root and we don’t mind odd shaped carrots. None of the carrots had any slug damage to the useable parts of the carrot but the largest one had been nibbled around the shoulder which had turned a little green and needed discarding in any case.
If the remaining crop are like this I won’t be complaining. They’ve already had the taste test which they passed with flying colours.
Thursday 28 August 2014
For One Day Only But…..
Summer made a welcome return on Thursday. For the first time in two weeks the temperature made it up to the 20°C mark reaching a respectable 21.6°C in the afternoon. Some rain in the early hours of the morning brought our monthly total up to 98.8mm. Will we manage 100mm before the end of the month?
Now to the but … as it was such a nice day we decided on a visit to Harlow Carr. There were lots of visitors and as we found a car parking space the sun was shining and it was a lovely afternoon. Getting out of the car we hummed and arred about taking a small brolly each just in case the weather should turn. In the sunshine it didn’t seem like a good option but we decided better safe than sorry and took the brollies.
Once into the gardens we headed for the parts we’d missed on our last rain interrupted visit. We hadn’t been in the gardens for more than a few minutes when the first few drops of rain fell. It surely couldn’t rain us off again could it? Undeterred we carried on looking for some inspiration for our new border at home. In the end we had to relent and head for the shelter of the alpine house. You may find lots of lovely pictures of alpines appearing soon as we spent some time sheltering waiting for the shower to pass over.
Unfortunately that didn’t really happen but in a short dry spell we headed for the kitchen garden. They have a couple of greenhouses there where we could shelter if the rain became heavy. One of the greenhouses also contained those tomato plants growing on straw bales and we wanted to see how they were doing.
For anyone interested in giving this method a go these are the instructions I forgot to photograph on our last visit. As for the success and amount of fruit you can expect from this method I’m not at all sure. I might see if I can find out later in the season if the RHS have any results from their trials.
Interestingly against most of the advice I’ve seen for growing tomatoes the vines haven’t been stopped as the plants have reached roof level but have been trained to grow up the roof to the ridge of the greenhouse.
The trusses of ripening tomatoes hang downwards more like grapes then tomatoes. The only variety planted up using the straw bale method that is the same as we’ve grown was Sungold which we’ve grown for the first time this year and been very pleased with. I’d guess it’s been producing lots of ripe fruit and as you can see from the photo above the trusses with fruit are now well on their way to the ridge of a very high greenhouse.
In a normal greenhouse I think you would quickly run out of growing height but whether this method gives better tastier crops and reduces problems like blossom end rot it would be useful to know.
After investigating the kitchen garden the rain still hadn’t stopped and after a look around the nursery we decided to head for home. The weather was still sunny and warm at home and I had plenty of time to cut the grass and clean out the pond filter. One day we will get a rain free visit to Harlow Carr.
Friday 29 August 2014
Reached the 100mm Mark
The return to summer didn’t last that long as late Friday afternoon and into the evening we had some more rain. It was enough to extend our August rainfall above the 100mm level for the month. It’s only the 4th month in five years of weather records that we’ve passed the 100mm mark. Our five wettest months are shown in the table below.
Top 5 Wettest Months
2010 -
August 2014 Rainfall
The rainfall total in the chart was automatically updated on 29 August at 23:01 and since then a little more rainfall has lifted that total to 106.00mm.
Friday morning had started out very pleasant lulling us into believing that summer may well have returned and we set off immediately after lunch for Stillingfleet Lodge Nurseries and garden to see if we could find the plants we are looking for to refurbish our borders. As you may have guessed the weather was lovely and sunny as we arrived although a bit breezy. Of course we hadn’t been looking around the gardens for many minutes before it started to rain. We’re getting used to this happening by now.
After sheltering from the heaviest of the rain we continued our garden visit in a mixture of light rain and drizzle. Then a look around the nursery was a pleasant surprise. It’s a nursery that propagates all its own plants rather than buying in plants so you can actually buy the varieties you see in the garden. We came away with a nice collection which I’m leaving Sue to post about in detail later
Saturday 30 August 2014
Some Computer Mischief
Saturday was a breezy day with some decent sunny spells but pleasant enough after the poor weather we’ve experienced through August.
Yesterday I posted about the rainfall for August reaching the 100mm mark for only the fourth month in the last five years. Something computerwise went very wrong and I’m not entirely sure why but the result was that the table was completely wrong and I only spotted the error on Sunday morning.
All my weather data is downloaded from my weather station into a Microsoft Excel spread sheet and from there it’s easy enough to extract data into a more user-
Above is a screen grab from my Excel spread sheet including the little green dotted line indicating the information to be copied and then pasted into my web publishing program. Note the dates are not all 2014. When this is pasted across the dates all miraculously changed to the year 2014 without me doing anything but clicking paste. Transferred into Web Plus this table looks like this.
For some reason it’s confused by the dates as the rainfall totals all copy correctly. So manually corrected the table with correct dates and rainfalls should look like this.
I’ve updated Saturday’s post with the corrected table. I now need to do a bit of investigating to find out why the dates didn’t transfer correctly in the first place.
Sunday 31 August 2014
Well I’m Amazed!
Sunday was a lovely day to finish off a poor August.
Over the last few days I’ve been lifting potatoes on the plot. These were our main crop potatoes grown under weed control fabric and I must admit for most of the summer I though it might have been a real blunder.
Last autumn I posted about clearing this bed where our old blackberry bush had grown for more years than I care to remember.
The ground was full of old blackberry roots, docks, couch grass and lots of bindweed. I removed what I could last autumn and left the ground to be broken up by the winter weather.
This year, in early March we were busy preparing other beds ready for our crops and as a few weeds were starting to grow in the bed as a quick measure it was covered in weed control fabric and left to be dealt with at a later date. There’s a sort of folklore about growing potatoes in a bed to help get it into good condition. This was in the back of my mind when I decided to plant this bed up with our “maincrop” potatoes Nicola and Charlotte. As in our trial of early potatoes planted under weed control fabric, I cut cross slits in the fabric and planted the potatoes with a trowel.
By the middle of July the tops were the best we had on our plots and had somehow avoided any blight that some of our other potatoes had been affected by. My nagging doubt with both rows of potatoes was whether we were really only growing them to feed the slugs. Having dug our early varieties grown under weed control fabric I had no real evidence that slug damage was worse using this method but some sixth gardening sense nagged at me saying it was slug heaven under this fabric. The ground hadn’t been cultivated for many years so there must be a build up of all those nasty creatures that love to eat anything that grows apart from weeds.
The tops died down and by the time it came to dig up the potatoes the bed looked like this.
It didn’t look too promising. Blackberries and bindweed were growing through the slits I’d made in the fabric and there wasn’t much left of the potato tops. I cut back the blackberry shoots as I didn’t fancy been shredded by the wicked thorns and cut back the weeds that had grown over from the edge of the path.
It was time to reveal the truth and see how our potatoes had done. One half of the fabric was pulled back to allow our Nicola potatoes to be cleared. The tops had done well so I was expecting decent potatoes but with lots of slug damage.
As expected some potatoes had grown underneath the fabric on top of the soil. The fabric hadn’t been covered with straw but the potatoes hadn’t turned green so the fabric had kept them dark enough. There was very little slug damage even to the potatoes on the “surface”. It wasn’t as though the slugs weren’t there as one or two had been taken by surprise when the fabric was removed.
Once the potatoes on the top had been collected the crop underneath was lifted and the potatoes were excellent and virtually free of any pest damage. I couldn’t believe that we’d got such a good crop of potatoes out of such rough ground.
This is our 21.5kg of Charlotte lifted on Sunday. Nicola produced a slightly larger haul of 22.4kg. We should have plenty of potatoes to see us through winter.
These two rows have produced around the same crop weight as I would expect from a couple of conventionally planted rows but without the weed control fabric I don’t think it would have been possible to grow any crop in this piece of ground as it would have become over run with weeds and blackberry shoots. I’m still amazed that there wasn’t any slug damage although I’ve thought for some time that Charlotte and Nicola are more resistant to slug damage than some other varieties.
The bed was dug over as the potatoes were lifted and as much blackberry root and bindweed root removed as possible. It amounted to two large compost bags full of the stuff which has gone into the council recycling system. The fabric was put back over the bed and covered in manure to keep it in place. Now it can be left over winter and the plan for next year will be for some brassicas in this bed.