Thursday 7 July 2011

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!!

Sunday 3 July 2011

Immature spuds...?

Have just got back from the plot - it was so hot and humid there. Did more weeding and sowed some spring onions (White Lisbon), Radish (Chinese Dragon) and Lollo Rosso in the raised bed.

Jamie pulled the last Lady ChristL from the first potato row - making room for our leeks, which we'll put in in the next week. The potatoes could clearly have formed more as you can see they're still green and on the stem (which wasn't buried). Looks like they could have done with more earthing up - we've never seen that before.

Still loads of well-formed spuds (1.5kg) to have with our first crop of broad beans for tea.

Chard snack

Dave gave me a lovely little yellow courgette so had that fried in butter with chard stems on top of the chard leaves with some rice. Lovely little lunch.

Saturday 2 July 2011

Everyone loves a Qualcast Panther 30!

We cut the paths where the grass had grown really tall along the edges of the plots and did lots of weeding.

We were at the plot at 8:00 this morning - beautiful and sunny and there were only a couple of other people there. The earth is really dry as you can see from the photo, but there's water not too far down and all the plants are finding it.
Transplanted 8 celery plants, 4 peppers and 2 tomatoes (ones from Carolyn & Paul) onto 8A.
The sweetcorn are looking healthy, as are all the beanies - should get to scoff some tomorrow. The brassicas look good, especially the pretty red cabbage but when you move a leaf you get a face-full of white fly :-{ Chemical warfare is imminent...

Minimum temp of just 5 degrees last night - crazy, no wonder the cucumber is about 10 centimetres tall and has already produced a flower!

Friday 1 July 2011

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...