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Anyone apart from Black birds want some strawberries?
The little eckers!!!
Had to cover all 8 of plants with a heavy netting,still enough fruit each morning to make the Muesli more interesting.
Will revise my original cucumber estimation from 10 days to I will have @least 2 by the weekend ready for picking,they seem to be growing as quick as the sun flowers in the garden.
Any suggestions for growing decent onions,mine are well spaced,planted on time & in a patch of the garden where other veg flourishes,yet my onions never quite reach their best,yet I grow fantastic,leak's,shallot's & garlic??????
still worried about my toms and I see that the french bean leaves are doing similar so I'm coming around to the idea that it's the horse shit in the pots. as the plants are growing I guess the roots are going deeper into it so the problem is now becoming apparent.
so - 2 possible causes - the horse shit is comtaminated with some low grade herbicide or it's simply too rich for the plants and causing physiological problems. anyone experienced issues with too rich a compost???
My french beans (all two of 'em
) are doing exactly the same thing, FB - the only thing in the garden that doesn't seem to be doing well right now, other than the slug-ravaged chard.
They're planted in the soil, along a fence that gets loads of sunlight - I think in my case it's possibly chemicals from when the fence was erected, which was only last year.
The fence is a fairly new, fairly fancy design that our neighbours put up - looks good from both sides, but has a combination of wood and plastics and some fairly strong staining - although I think my nextdoor neighbour might also have used some fairly nasty weedkiller on her garden (I personally don't have any truck with that sort of stuff)...
I phoned our allotments officer this morning to ask that after September we go down to half a plot. I'm really sad about it, but the full one is just too much for us just now, and I'm fairly sure there's a massive waiting list.
Once we're in half a plot (still a good 30to 40 feet each way, so still not tiny) we can re-organise over winter and start again properly in spring. What we've been doing the last couple of years is just trying to play catch up, rotovate then plant almost the same weekend and we're just not getting on top of it.
In the half we'll be keeping, we've got a shed, a greenhouse, compost bins and permanent raspberry canes. Everything else can be moved over, paths can be made narrower to make the most of what space we will have and we can do the things we missed out on first time round when we were setting the beds up. Even if we don't sow any over wintering crops until we've got the new beds marked out and dug, we shouldn't be too far behind come spring time.
and sprinkle some of the pellets around things as this will act as slow release
My 1st beetroot of the year
They made your arse twitch when I tweaked it sweetie
Lots of rotted horse poo in the patch H
I keep the side shoots off mine as it's easier to tie the main stem in against a cane that way and you can get more plants in whatever space you have. bushing just tends to make management more difficult as air movement is less around the plant which can lead to botrytis. but if the plant has plenty of space, leave it bush if you want.....
shows how quickly plants come up with this heat- planted some salad leaf seeds in Sunday - first leaves are poking above the soil this morning.....
Nicko - good point about alkalinity - hadn't thought about that. the plants are still growing and setting fruit so I'll leave them and see what happens. I'm starting to feed them with tomato feed as the trusses are setting so that may help
The blight of every of beetroot grower pink hands
Thats what I thought FB heheheheheheh
Pink is the new dirt colour.
So how were them beets then Nicko?
I don't think you can 'beet' them with salad cream & nice mature chedder between to slices of crusty wholemeal bread.
Salad cream bluuuuuuueerrrrrrrrrrrrr
Had some with baby pots and pizza
Cooked some more yesterday, yummmmmmmmmmmm
Morning all!
Glad to see people are starting to enjoy the fruits of their labours!
Those beets looked ace, Nick!
My french beans seem to have picked up a little - the newer leaves coming through seem to be a lot more normal looking. Dunno quite why, but hey!
I'm now wondering when to start digging up spuds - the pretty mauve flowers on my Maris Peers (second earlies) are now coming to an end (I've never known a variety of spud to flower so profusely!) so does this mean I can start harvesting?
I could do with starting to clear some of the spud space to plant out the rest of the leeks I got from my parents - I've already planted some of them in large containers for baby leekage, but I've still got quite a few left and they're Musselburghs; a variety best planted in the ground to overwinter.
Toms from Haile look to be doing really well (cheers, dude
), some pea pods are nearly ready to pick, carrots and turnips are progressing slowly but surely, and salad leaves are still going strong. I've pulled up the rocket and mispoona now and am experimenting with a wide variety of other leaves less likely to bolt in the heat.
Also got lots of nasturtiums popping up all over the place - should add colour, add to the ecosystem of the garden somewhat, and be edible as well.
Onions are so-so
- luckily I've not spent any money on them as I got a load of spare sets from my uncle (the joys of having lots of relatives who grow stuff - free seeds and plants!)
In other news, I'm very, very unhappy about my courgettes.
The plants from Haile are looking reasonably healthy, but seem only to be producing male flowers.
Anyone know why this might be?
My original two courgette plants are still incredibly stunted, yellow and small, despite being really promising-looking to start with.
I'm not sure whether there's something wrong with the soil in that particular spot of the garden - aside from the french bean problems near the fence, for the most part I have the most amazingly good soil which virtually anythying will grow in.
But near the house, I have the aforementioned stunted courgette plants and various herbs (thyme, rosemary, oregano) which are getting very speckledy leaves, and they're not variegated varieties so I think something's up.
Any ideas?
first meal of french beans last night - gorgeous...
LP - courgettes are hungry beasts - have you tried feeding them with either tomato feed or chicken shit?? that might help both flowering and the stunted look but it maybe the soil as well. mine are doing well in pots and I'm now starting to crop them.
my squash plants are also producing some proto-squashes so hoping for bigger things there!