Penellype's 2016 Garden Diary

[craftymarie]

Let's hope it is not blight. Tomato plants do start looking a bit worse for wear at this point. I topped up the compost in my containers a few weeks back and gave a dose of epsom salts which perked mine up a bit and they now have some new growth on. If it is blight, I guess you won't have to wait too long to find out. Fingers crossed it's not.

[Penellype]

Thanks craftymarie. It hasn't got any worse through the day, but it is dry, warm and sunny at the moment. Tomorrow is forecast to be damp and if it is blight I expect to find it has spread considerably by Thursday morning. Fingers crossed that it doesn't.

[Penellype]

Having a major "removals" day today, precipitated partly by the possible blight situation and partly by the diminishing sunlight.

Firstly I harvested 2 buckets of Desiree potatoes for a total of 2.65kg from 6 seed potatoes. There is 1 bucket left which has a lot of green still on it so I am leaving that one for now. The potatoes vacated one of the raised beds which has a support round it suitable for a net. I had a piece of net left over so I covered it over and moved a bucket of brokali and one of kohlrabi out from under the strawberry shelves (where it is very dark). I was amazed to find the 2 kohlrabi plants look like this:



They are about 2 inches across so of edible size. I was expecting nothing much from these.

The next job was to lift the remaining onions, which are now drying on a rack on the lawn. This has freed up a bit of space on the veg garden which isn't exactly in full sun, but is not in 100% shade. I always find it hard to believe that by the end of August the height of the sun and the length of daylight is equivalent to that in mid April, but if you work either side of 21st June (longest day) you will see that this is true. With each passing day the shadows cast by the garage walls on the south side and the hedge (east) and house (west) get longer, shading more of the garden for more of the day.

There were 2 containers that really needed moving. One was a square pot of swede in the dark area between the raised beds and fruit cage, which doesn't mind shade, but would probably appreciate a few glimpses of sunlight before winter sets in, and the other was a saladgrow planter of leeks which was up against the north facing garage wall and was no longer getting any morning sun. The space on the veg garden was not big enough for both.

I tried to talk myself into removing one of the courgette plants in the cold frame to make room for the swede - both of these have mildew very badly, but both do have small courgettes forming which may or may not develop. But I hate removing anything that might produce more food, so I decided to trim off the big and badly mildewed leaves and cram the pot of swede in between the 2 plants:



It seems to fit ok

The saladgrow was a real pig to move because it was absolutely full of water and the compost was completely saturated. Once again the long suffering lawn was pressed into service to house the wormery (which was in the way) and the top of the saladgrow while I baled out the bottom part into a watering can. I then had to carry both parts through the archway onto the veg garden, and put it back together. Although it looks square, only one of the 4 possible orientations is correct (I have no idea why they made it that way) and the bits of capillary matting have to be fed back through the holes into the water tray, so it took some sorting out. I don't think you are really meant to move these once they are planted up, and I am probably getting to old for this sort of thing! Anyway it is now settled into its new home with minimal damage:



The floppy plants were leaning on the fuchsias before - hopefully they will soon straighten up, if not I will eat them.

Along with yesterday's job (replanting some of the strawberries into a Hozelock planter), I feel I have done a good couple of days work!



I am going to try growing tomatoes in these in my friend's greenhouse next year as they take up less height than the quadgrow pots.

Finally, I am about to be swamped with runner beans:

[Penellype]

This weekend

At my friend's:
With heavy and persistent rain forecast for Saturday afternoon and evening, the first job on the list was to bring the rest of the onions under cover to finish drying.These are the same variety that I always grow (Sturon) but they are definitely the biggest yet. Some are over 6 inches across. I can only think that mulching them with the contents of last year's hotbed was responsible!
Rain stopped play half way through Saturday morning, with only a little weeding done.
On Sunday I went to pick tomatoes in the greenhouse and found that a lot of the fruit on the Garden Pearl has been chewed. Removed about 8 large green caterpillars with yellow stripes down the sides. Some sort of moth seems likely. Sigh.
Removed a load of brambles from the bushes near the veg garden.
Harvested cucumber, loads of tomatoes and beans.

At home:
Nothing doing on Saturday afternoon - far too wet.
Weeding and deadheading on Sunday, and I also removed a lot of unproductive branches from the Legend (bush) tomato plant that has gone very yellow. There are only 5 fruits on this, all on the main stem, and I am most unimpressed.
Harvested tomatoes, beans, carrots and calabrese. (oops, forgot about the lettuce, mizuna, namenia, spinach and blueberries!!!)

[Penellype]

Blight

I was beginning to think I had got away with it, as the black marks on the Sungold tomatoes have not got any worse. However, yesterday when I was looking round I noticed a couple of brown marks on the leaves of the Christmas Charlotte potatoes. I nipped these off and looked again today. The plants were much worse. There were 3 buckets near the fence and 2 on the path near the hedge. The ones near the hedge have more airflow and don't look too bad (although they are infected) but the ones near the fence had loads of blotches on the leaves with the tell tale white fuzz on the undersides, and the stems were starting to go brown. Classic signs of late blight.

This gives me a problem. I emptied some compost out of the bottom of the hotbin at the beginning of last week, and did my best to push as much of the top stuff down into the bottom as possible (I have no idea why it doesn't fall down under gravity...). However there isn't much room at the top, and the bin seems to work much better that way, staying at around 60C whereas if I make a big space at the top it drops down to about 40C. Today's 3 buckets worth of blighted foliage filled the hotbin to the brim. I will almost certainly have 2 more buckets worth tomorrow and if the tomatoes get it (very likely) there will be much, much more. We are in the middle of a Smith period at the moment. I really don't want to have to store buckets of blighty foliage while I wait for the hotbin to cook the first lot, so I might need to take some sort of drastic action soon, like going to the tip!

[craftymarie]

I'm so sorry to read this, Penellype What a disappointment for you. You've got some tomatoes which have resistance to blight, I think you said. So let's hope they don't all come down with it.

[Penellype]

Thanks craftymarie. Christmas potatoes are always a bit of a gamble because of the risk of blight. I've got away with it for 2 years but not this time. The plants had just started to form flower buds, so I would be very surprised if there is anything much bigger than a pea in there, but I am going to leave the compost undisturbed for a few days and then have a look.

The tomatoes are upwind of the potatoes and there is a trellis fence and some runner beans between them. I would be very surprised if the Sungold tomatoes survive. Some of the Mountain Magic are downwind of the potatoes and very close to them so it will be a good test of their blight resistance. We shall see. I have already harvested quite a few Sungold, so its not a complete write-off if they do get blight now.

[Chris11]

I tried for Christmas potatoes one year, and they got blight pretty quickly and came to nothing.
Nice idea, but as Penellype says, a bit of a gamble.

But that's also got me thinking, are potatoes more prone to blight than tomatoes? And does growing potatoes increase the chance of blight spreading to the tomatoes?

[Penellype]

I think both are very prone to blight, which is why I am trying blight resistant varieties of tomato (Mountain Magic and Ferline) and I always grow some blight resistant potatoes (Sarpo Mira). I presume at some point some bright person will develop a Sarpo variety that is suitable for Christmas spuds, as these are far more vulnerable to late blight (the worst sort) than the normal early potatoes grown in spring. The only Sarpo varieties I have come across so far are all maincrop,which take too long to grow in the cool conditions in autumn.

[Penellype]

A few loose ends to tidy up.

Nematodes
I applied the vine weevil ones last week and the slug ones yesterday. Hopefully they will control the slug population, which is the worst I have known here for years. I removed 10 slugs of varying sizes and colours from under just one of the buckets of potatoes I cut down yesterday. There are also a lot of snails which I don't think the nematodes kill, unfortunately.

Winter spinach
Last year I got some Giant Winter which sounded likely to fit the bill. It was disappointing last year, which I put down to being sown too late, but this time I sowed 25 seeds in August and only 6 have germinated. I also tried overwintering Amazon, but that was also pretty poor, although it did very well in the spring. I currently have a small crop of Banjo, which has nice big leaves, so I think I will sow a bucket of those and see how they do in the growhouse over winter. I do have some spare buckets now, thanks to the blight (every cloud, and all that).

Fuchsia Berries
These looked so promising - after all, I can grow ordinary fuchsias in my garden and they always need deadheading, so I was confident of getting fruit. The fuchsia berry plants are very pretty - the ones in the quadgrow pots are covered in flowers, but the fruit keeps falling off. Nothing, so far, has got to the edible purple stage. The ones in the bucket, which are supposed to be part of the flower garden, are desperately disappointing. They have been attacked by capsid bug (I think) and have about 6 flowers between the 4 plants. To add insult to injury, I went to see my brother a couple of days ago, and he has a hardy fuchsia growing next to his front door. The bush is covered in rows and rows of berries, unfortunately not the supposedly nice tasting sort.

Leeks
I can grow leeks, but they are always thin - a bit like the spring onions you can buy in the shops. I've tried growing in soil, raised beds, pots, troughs and buckets with little improvement so this year I went to town on it, starting them off in rootrainers and transplanting them into a self watering saladgrow planter. They looked very promising at the transplant stage, almost the required "pencil thickness". However, they haven't done nearly as well as I expected and several have bolted. I think the problem must be that I am trying to grow them in the shade (the ones grown at my friend's in the sun are bigger, but not huge). Next year I think I will revert to buckets (but keep the rootrainer idea) and grow plants that appreciate the self watering feature in the saladgrow.

Runner beans
I have the slugs to thank for an unintentional experiment. Normally I sow all my runner beans at once and expect them to crop over a decent length of time. I always end up with a huge glut and then they seem to finish really quickly. This year the slugs ate most of the first lot so I sowed some more. I ran out of red flowered ones so I ordered some Firestorm, which I haven't grown before, and when they arrived I just had to try them. So I have 3 sowings, not 1, and I have had to improvise to find spaces fro them. I've found they grow well in 11 litre pots (2 plants) and 30 litre buckets (4 plants) and that I get beans over a much longer period if I sow them in 3 lots. Its not often I am grateful to slugs for destroying my crops!

[Penellype]

Update on the blight

The 2 remaining buckets of potatoes didn't look too bad today, so I cut off any leaves I could see with brown patches and left them. The tomatoes seem ok for now touch wood.

I decided that since there was very unlikely to be much to eat in the buckets I had cut down it wouldn't do any harm to turn them out and see what I'd got. The seed potatoes were planted only 43 days ago (25th July).

As expected there were a large number of pea sized potatoes that really weren't big enough to eat. In amongst these was this little lot (teaspoon for size comparison)



216g of baby new potatoes, enough to make 2 decent meals of potato salad.

As a total harvest from 9 seed potatoes it can hardly be described as a roaring success, but at least I got something to eat for my trouble, and there should be a few more from the remaining 2 buckets.

[Penellype]

Harvested the last 2 buckets of Charlotte potatoes as the leaves were showing more and more spots of blight and rain is forecast, which could only make it worse. I had hopes of a meal's worth or more from these, but was bitterly disappointed as none of the potatoes were really worth bothering with (although there were loads of tiny ones). The only thing I can think of is that these 2 buckets started off in shadier positions and had to wait until space could be made for them. It was odd though, because these 2 were healthier, had more foliage and were the only 2 buckets with flower buds on. It just shows that you can't always tell what's underground simply by looking at the tops!

The tomatoes are not showing signs of blight yet. I find this very odd. Some years I have had tomatoes with blight but the potatoes haven't caught it and this year it seems to be the other way round. One of the Balconi red plants was only about a foot from the leaves of one of the blighty potato plants. Yet everyone insists it is the same disease on both crops. What I have got on some of the tomatoes appears to be fusarium wilt. The Legend plant that was looking yellow and sick was cut down and there was a tell-tale brown area inside the base of the stem. The Roma plant which was next to it is also wilting and I think it will have to go soon (its supposed to be resistant), and 2 of the Ferline (also resistant) are wilting - however one of thee is wilting because its stem snapped under the weight of the fruit. I keep picking the fruit as soon as it starts to change colour in case the blight strikes, as once you see it it is usually too late to save the crop.

Here is some of the tomato harvest so far:



On the left, Ferline and Shirley. Then 4 punnets of recently harvested Sungold, 3 more punnets of Sungold and some Mountain Magic, Then Sungold, Balconi red and Garden Pearl, Balconi yellow and the ripest Mountain Magic, the ripest Balconi red, and the ripest Sungold. There is also a table with the more dodgy fruit on it in the sitting room...

I think I am going to have plenty of tomatoes to eat, even if they do now get the blight!

(Incidentally the amount of Shirley looks very small - these are from my friend's greenhouse and most of the fruit are splitting as they ripen, so they can't be stored with the rest.)

[craftymarie]

You've got a good harvest there. Tomatoes have been great this year. My freezer is chock full of tomato soup! It's great that yours have escaped blight so far and good to know that just because potatoes get it doesn't mean the tomatoes will too.

I've had to tie my Shirley plants to the polytunnel ceiling bars - they are just so heavy with the fruit and some of the stems are breaking off. Tired of tying them up.

[Penellype]

Pak choi



Normally when I grow pak choi I get about 4 leaves about an inch long and then it bolts. This one was grown in one of my self watering saladgrow planters and I ate it for tea in a stir fry this evening. The leaves were a little chewed round the edges, but nothing serious. There are a couple more where that one came from

[Penellype]

This weekend

At my friend's:
Saturday was forecast to be thoroughly wet, so I decided to stay at home where I could nip indoors if necessary. In fact it didn't rain at all.
On Sunday I cut down some Himalayan balsam that was growing in the bushes and threatening to seed itself all over the veg plot.
Did some weeding
Sorted out a net cover and planted out some winter cabbages
Harvested a red cabbage, loads of tomatoes, a cucumber, peppers and the obligatory courgette.
I originally planted 3 courgette plants - a Piccolo (round green), goldmine (yellow) and green bush. The first night the green bush was eaten down to a stalk by slugs and I wrote it off as dead. But when I was weeding round the Goldmine I noticed a few smaller, fresher looking leaves poking out from under the mass of huge, mildewed foliage, and with them a green courgette and several more flower buds. <Penellype sits in the corner of the garden hugging knees, rocking back and forth and gibbering "courgettes...too many courgettes...">

At home:
Another major removals operation brought on by extra space created by the absence of 5 buckets of blighty potatoes.
Levelled off the area near to the fence, which was on a bit of a slope. I'm eventually going to move the cold frame here.
Moved the Buddy strawberries with their shelf onto the levelled area for more sun for the strawberries.
Put the bucket of Giant Winter spinach (only 4 surviving seedlings) and the bucket of recently sown spinach Banjo (just germinated) under the strawberries, covered with a net. The strawberries are also netted to keep off the wasps.
Moved the 2 buckets of broccoli out of their net as it was getting too tall and covered them with some individual taller covers.
Put the harvested calabrese where the broccoli were in case they feel like producing sideshoots.
Moved a brokali plant into the carrot cage as there was a space in there (I was saving it for spring cabbage but I have other plans for that now).
Replaced the brokali with the other calabrese plant, emptying the small net next to the carrot cage, so I could move it out of the way.
Cut down the runner beans over the cold frame as these have finished.
Removed the very sickly looking courgette plant from near the weigela bush - it has never looked happy for some reason. Replaced it with one of the balconi tomatoes to give that some more sun. 2 of these have been planted in self watering balconniere pots, one in a quadgrow and one in an ordinary pot on a self watering tray. The results have been astonishing, with huge crops of tomatoes for such small plants, which started producing ripe fruit in May. This is the red one in the quadgrow today (the bigger green tomatoes behind are Mountain Magic):



Checked, checked and checked again for blight on the Sungold tomatoes. Looking good so far. The tomatoes near the hotbin are not faring so well - more of this in the next post.
Planted out the chinese cabbages in the saladgrow, replacing the harvested spinach.
Sowed winter lettuce and mibuna
Harvested beans, courgettes (gulp), carrots, spinach, calabrese, loads of tomatoes, lettuce, mizuna, namenia, pak choi (see above), blueberries and the first non-windfall apple.