Hot and Blighty!

We went to the plot after work as it's been a really hot day and was a lovely sunny evening. We found this mutant calendula - interesting look for a flower!

We had to cut down all the potato haulms (foliage) due to blight sweeping across the site - not at all surprising given the amount of water we've had this year and it's been very humid over the last couple of days - hopefully our tubers are mostly ok, but blighted spuds won't store. We stuck sticks in so we don't forget where each plant is!


Cleared spud plot

We also saw some exciting wildlife! Les and his son, Nathan, came down to our plot for a photo of the slow worm they found in their compost bins. It looked like it's tail had regrown at least once. We saw two frogs hopping round our plot.

Both of these are very welcome visitors.

A less welcome guest, but still interesting to see, was a mole! He was foraging through the grass, digging small holes for worms. Unfortunately my photo was too blurry to post.

As HEAT were on site for their weekly communal allotment evening there were drinks and biscuits provided, so we didn't leave till the sun had gone. HEAT (Hungerford Environment Action Team) really want more people to join in with their allotment - anyone who doesn't think they can handle a full allotment should come along to Marsh Lane on Thursdays at 7:30pm to talk to Suz or Catherine.

Some you win, some you lose

We had a few hours on the plot yesterday morning. Jamie digging the new plot - which is a real struggle, so many stones; and I was mostly weeding - the weeds sure do love this weather!

I planted the remaining french marigold plants. Most of them are in the legume quarter as they are meant to ward off aphids and I put the last 5 plants in the cabbage plot for the same reason. We have a bit of extra space in there because one of the cabbage plants died. We're not sure why. It went a bit reddish (we thought we'd sowed a red cabbage by mistake) and then it just gave up growing and shrivelled away :-(

Happy cabbages

Two of the sweetcorn plants didn't survive but the rest look pretty happy - we've left their protective cloches on because it's still windy (and obviously rainy!). 

We've noticed that the celeriac leaves have started going brown. I've checked it on a few websites and it is either celery fly, celery leaf miner or fungus blight or leaf spot. I figure the leaf spot or blight are the most likely so we're off to the plot shortly to pull all the affected leaves off - hopefully there will be a few left growing!

Browning leaves on celeriac

Some of the shallots have formed flower heads, so I pulled them off - don't want the energy going into the flowers rather than the bulbs.
We managed to get home before the torrential rain started. Me with a small handful of mange tout as usual! I like them just cooked briefly in boiling water - it's a scrummy snack but not a diet I'm going to live on for long!

Mostly talking onions

We had a great day on the allotment - several hours of pottering around and chatting to fellow plot holders. Even had time to burn a lot of old weeds and bamboo canes (we checked very carefully for ladybirds and other good guys first).
We put our bean wigwam up - just 6 x 8ft canes. That's enough runner beans for us; plus plenty to give away at work!
I spent much of the time weeding, particularly around the onion plot. The seedlings are growing happily now.

Oarsman leeks

Silverskin & 'White Lisbon' Spring Onions

Spring onions, silverskin onions and leeks seedlings all look similar with the same bent-over grass blade look - the first year we took on the plot we thought they were grass, until we pulled them out and the smell of onion was really strong even with a tiny seedling - luky otherwise the whole row would have been pulled up!!

The shallots are dividing well - some of the leaves appear to have signs of downy mildew (the curse that we had with onions last year). Not too suprising given the weather but hopefully it won't cause too much damage...

And the onions are looking happy too - though when we got home I noticed this little hole in the onion leaf - well, we know there's always some insect that wants to get at our produce before us!!

A drizzly day

I had the day off work today - not a great day for working on the plot, but at least it was only drizzling for part of the day (unfortunately that was the part while we were there!).

We made up an enviromesh cage for our onions - we're hoping this will keep them clear of leek moth which was all over the site last year :-(
We did say last year that we're going to cover the whole site with enviromesh, but we'll stick with just covering individual beds for this year :-)


Yellow is this year's colour for enviromesh

We cleared the beets which have been in the ground for about 10 months  - this ugly giant and most of the others have gone into the compost but we took a couple more reasonable-sized ones home; Boltardy aren't meant to go woody even when they're old - we'll see...
The vole/mice hadn't even ventured into this big one, but some of the others had severe slug/snail damage.

Me, with the ugly giant

We hoed and levelled the potato quarter where the onions and other alliums will be going. We're making sure that the chicken manure pellets are well worked into the ground before we get the onions and shallots planted.
We also cleared the cabbage patch and there are only a few sprouts left and then that quarter will be ready for the potato trench preparation.

Cabbage Patch

Ventured under the cabbage netting (which hasn't been terribly successful at keeping butterflies off) and weeded. I pulled a couple of the red cabbages which have split and been eaten. I found a lot of snails and slugs in there - netting won't help against them! You can see from the picture that the non-eaten cabbages look brill.

This month's pest - Leek Moth

Well, another crop has gone because of the pests! The leeks have been looking bedraggled for a few weeks but after confirming that we have leek moth we decided to bite the bullet and pull the whole lot up :-(

 

Such a shame, though I did manage to save a few to eat (after some very careful checking for critters!)

 Jamie dug the patch over and we took all the leaves and other waste home to attempt to avoid contaminating the ground with any remaining caterpillars/pupae. Hopefully our friendly robin will spot any that we didn't clear...

The ground did look good after it was dug though - it looked a bit awful with a load of miserable looking leeks on it!

Spuds and Tomatoes

The Congo potatoes are still looking amazing with their lovely white flowers. However, either blight or some other mould has got some of the leaves, so we chopped some of the foliage down.

 

And, because we weren't convinced that there would be any actual tubers we dug plant up. It was amazing! Really nobbly long spuds and lots of them. They were mainly growing pretty close to the surface but the roots spread a long way either side.

We couldn't wait till dinner time so had some boiled for lunch. The water that came off them was a fabulous green! Some lost a lot of their purple colour but plenty were purple throughout and you can see some have a great greeny-type skin! They look fab and they tasted good!!

We decided to pull the tomatoes (Gardener's Delight) because the foliage has blight and we wanted to save the toms to make some green tomato chutney. We had lots of fruit on the two plants - some we'll be able to ripen up at home. We've eaten some of the tomatoes and they're super-sweet, such a shame the site always succombs to blight - we need to try and get our tomatoes fruiting earlier next year...

So, we had a lovely trugful of goodies to take home! Obviously including a courgette which had grown too big and runner beans (cos it's September!)

Colourful food

We picked salad bits for lunch, just to have with some humous. Lovely colourful trayful - 3 coloured carrots, 2 coloured mini-turnips, radishes, spring onions and cucumber. We also had some of our own tomatoes which eventually went red in the window.

There wasn't much happening on the plot, we did a bit of weeding and just chatted to people.

Blight has finally reached our tomato plants and the Congo potato plants. We've been waiting for it to strike - it's been around site for quite a while and the weather has been starting to get misty in the mornings.. We're going to pick all the tomatoes and redden what we can or we'll probably make some green tomato chutney.

We're also going to make some runner bean chutney when we pick the beans tomorrow.

Er, no, not immature spuds!

A little searching has shown that actually, they're known as aerial tubers. They seem to be symptoms of Rhizoctonia (see http://www.scribd.com/doc/22035248/Rhizoctonia-Canker-and-Black-Scurf-of-Potatoes). The cankers appear on the foliage and the black scurf appears on the tubers. We saw some of this dark sooty deposit on some of our spuds last year but it wasn't apparent on any of these Lady ChristL ones.
There certainly didn't appear to be any adverse affect to the taste, look or quantity of tubers - maybe that's because we pulled them quite early.
Ho hum, just another disease to be aware of this year!!

Downy Mildew

Not great news, but not terrible news regarding the onions. The stems have been looking a bit puckered and have been bending over for a little while. Turns out they've got Downy Mildew - basically due to horrible weather, oh, and watering from above rather than just at the bulb...

Jamie found some information about it in the US - see link.

At least we should get some onions to scoff though and won't have to pull the lot which we were worried about - they just won't be so impressive as some of the huge bulbs people have around site :-(

The shallots seem to have got away with it so far because they're just about ready to be picked and dried.

At least we've got flowers on our dwarf french beans now so we should see some signs of beans soon...

A few possible problems..

We went to the plot after work, only went to pull some spuds but spent 2 hours up there chatting.
We've had some different problems on the plot this year but blight is certainly on site again as it has been both previous years. A few people have started putting Dithane 945 on their potato plants and tomatoes and we may join them this year. So far our plot seems to have got away with it, but it's bound to succumb.

Found this little soldier beetle on the potato plants.

The broad beans may be big enough by the weekend. Took the top off one of the broad bean plants as it was completely covered with blackfly, but the beans will be fine. The peas (petit pois) have started filling out - we tasted a couple of pod-fuls - so tasty.

The french beans have got their first flower buds and the runner beans have started to climb...

Courgette

The onions are looking a bit dodgy - they have mildew on them :-( Hopefully they'll continue to bulb up before they go down completely. The shallot tops are dying off so they should be ok....

Congo flower buds

Pulled another Lady ChristL - 1.43kg. Flower buds have appeared on the Congo spuds - 4 of the plants look good but one is really weak.

Picked some lovely colourful chard to go with chives & spuds for tea. Then beetroot and lettuce to add to lunch tomorrow.