Blight Fright!

We thought a week ago that our main crop might have blight. Blight is probably one of the worse diseases you can get and it can wipe out your whole crop. It was the cause of the Irish potato famine and so obviouly we were pretty concerned. I'd seen loads of pictures of the leaves curling at the end and going brown - and this is excatly what we had so hence the worry.

What is blight?
Blight is a fungus – Phytophthora infestans. It's triggered by warm wet conditions and August this year has been great for blight - warm and SO much rain. The first thing are brown patches on the leaves. The tubers can be affected as well and they'll just rot from the skin through the flesh.

What can you do to prevent it?
Well, not much really. It's killed by cold weather so cross your fingers for a few cold days! There are a few chemical treatments Bordeaux mixture which is organically approved but contains copper which probably isn't that good for you... and Diathane 945 which sounds horrid!

The best way to get round is it to choose a variety that is less affected by blight.

Thompsan & Morgan have a good list here.

What can you do to treat it?
Again, not much! If it's just a few leaves that seem to be affected then you can remove those. Whatever you do, don't put them on your compost heap! The spores will love it in there. If possible burn. By pruning this may stop the spores from reaching the tubers (as long as they're well earthed up)

We duly followed instructions and took off any foilage that showed signs of browning. The plants actually look pretty healthy - albeit a little bald now! I'm now not sure that it is actually blight. I've read a few forums and I think we might be lucky...

Watch this space!

Tomato Troubles!

Yes, look at these beauties. Luscious and green and bursting full of summer. Our tomatoes are doing great. Well, SOME of our tomatoes are doing great. It seems we have 3 stages of tomato health in our garden.

The shot above is of the latest plants to be repotted. And because we'd run out of room for hanging baskets we planted them in a potato patio planter. They don't seem to mind, infact I would say they're thriving.

So in order of decline, next on our list is one of the hanging baskets.
Now, they look OK. They definitely don't look healthy. Just OK. This shot is of the hanging basket that's to the right of the shed door. The shot below is the one to the left.
Now, they definitely don't look healthy. I would go so far as to say they don't even look OK. Originally both hanging baskets were looking like the shot above, so we did a little test and fed the one on the right more often than the one on the left. It seems to have worked because the one on the right does look better than the left. But why are they having troubles when the fellas in the patio planter are looking brilliant?

Maybe the depth of the soil?
The plants in the hanging baskets obviously won't have as much room as they would in the patio planter. But we used the baskets last year and had no problems.

Maybe the soil we used?
This year we've only used peat free soil so maybe that's caused a problem. We also lined the baskets with sphagnum moss this year. Again, could that be leeching all the minerals away from the tomatoes?

I checked in the ever helpful Vegetable & Herb Expert by Dr. D G Hessayon and we think it might be magnesium deficiency. You can help this by spraying the plants with epsom salts. This we did last weekend... hard to say whether they look any better. They certainly don't look any worse so I guess we have to be thankful for that.

Oh... and the huge downpours we've been having have caused some of the fruit to split... all in all, not a good year for the tomatoes so far.

Books, lovely books.

Books. We love them. We have far too many and by default not enough space but we'd never be without them. Our dream home would most definitely have a library.

But surprisingly we don't actually have that many gardening books. Any problems we come across we do tend to just Google – there is so much information out there and some great forums where people are just happy to help – Gardeners Corner being a great example.

But there's nothing like sitting down of an evening with a cup of tea (or a glass of wine if you've earnt it!) and pondering over a book. And everyone has a favourite, one they go back to time and time again. And our favourite is The Vegetable & Herb Expert by Dr. D G Hessayon. It truly is a classic and the worlds best-selling book on growing vegetables and herbs.
Inside it's choc-a-bloc full of brilliant photographs and illustrations. It is unbelievable helpful when it comes to diseases and problems.
Each problem is detailed and has full colour illustrations. It's proved so useful and we refer back to it time and time again.
Infact, I was reading it this morning to try and find out what is wrong with our tomatoes – more about that in another post.

So if you're going to buy one book, get this one! And best of all, it's so cheap! Available on Amazon for just £4.00. An absolute bargain.

Pete-ettes

Pete (& Pat) look what they've gone and done. They've bred. They've created another two of the damn things. And oh guess where they were tonight... yup – our garden!

Now our garden is small. It can handle one Wood Pigeon (Pete) quite comfortably. Two Wood Pigeons (Pete & Pat) is a bit of a squeeze, they kinda get in the way - their wings are too big, it's awkward.

Four. No, four is just not going to work. Pete (& Pat) this is not a creche - you've got to sort out nursery, or get your parents to look after them during the day or something. This just isn't right and it's definitely not OK.

A dinner full of roots

Our beetroot is doing us so proud. We're really chuffed with how well they're doing. We planted a lot more than we did last year simply because we enjoyed them so much.

We've only got a tiny little garden and a quarter of the land is taken up with the beauties, and we made sure that this year we staggered our planting - so hopefully we'll have more of a constant supply rather than like last year where we had a massive glut for 2 weeks and then nothing!

Our current favourite way to eat them is roasted with some nice garlic and rosemary oil but this year I'm hoping that we'll have enough to make our own Borscht soup - a real favourite in the little gardeners house.

And if we're going to pull some beets today it only makes sense to pull some carrots too. I mean.. how could you not. I think the baby carrots are one of my top 5 crops from the garden. Infact they're probably a close second to the tomatoes - maybe even joint first.

Flowering at last

My my, it's been a long wait but finally the chillies have begun to flower. I can't believe how long they have taken. We planted them indoors in March so that's over 5 months to get to this stage. I guess our UK climate is not ideal for these fellas.

So a few more weeks and we'll be able to make our own all'Arrabbiata and if timings are good we may even be lucky enough to use some homegrown tomatoes.

Undergound Surprises

There is nothing like the surprise that you get from root vegetables. The delight in pulling up a perfectly round beetroot or a twisted knobbly carrot.

It's because you can't see what's happening. You just have to let nature takes it course and hope that everything is going according to plan. But when things start to grow, you get a tiny little glimpse of what could be, that's when I start to get impatient! I want to pull that beetroot! I want to see how big the carrots are! Just look at that beetroot - tempting us with a little peak!

But this weekend we've had disappointment to deal with. We pulled some of our first earlies and I must admit I was very underwhelmed. We went for the recently launched Accord – partly because they're ideal for containers and we'd decided early on that all our potatoes we would grow this way. They're also high yeilding and disease resistant – particularly against eelworm

We admit that we were pretty late in chitting and planting them but we honestly thought that they'd been in for a while and were ready to harvest. Here are our results from three plants!
Rubbish! 20 potatoes! And some of those so small they don't really count! We were gutted! Luckily we opted to harvest just one pot first just incase something like this happened. So the other container we're going to leave for maybe another month to hopefully increase the yield.

I think we'll try and be a little more patient with the rest of our underground friends.
Although... that baby carrot does look REALLY tempting. I must say - I have never tasted something so delicious and surprising than a home grown baby carrot. They beat the supermarket by just miles and miles.
And this year we've attempted to grow onions from seed. We use a lot of onions so it makes sense for us to grow them but I just don't get these set onions. So you buy a small onion – you put it in the ground and you get a bigger onion. Just doesn't seem worth it to me? So we never really bothered with sets. But, fingers crossed, the seeds seem to be doing OK.