Seeds for a new growing season

Monday 22nd January 2018
This year's seed order
After yesterday's seed audit, I sat down to think about what to grow this year. I have decided to concentrate on what we know we like to eat and what I know grows.
I am going to finally give up on some crops.

OUT 😢

Celeriac - too unpredictable, with decent bulbs only every few years

Aubergine - I've never had anything more than a pathetic crop in the polytunnel. Never ripens well and fruits are small. Also one of the first plants to host red spider mite. Has to go.

Outdoor peas - only grew well one year, when we were virtually waterlogged. OK for a small plot where it can be watered plenty. 

Kohl rabi - grows well but we're not that fussed

Asparagus pea - great for bees and a pretty plant, but the pods taste less like asparagus and more like cardboard

Hamburg Parsley - a nice idea, parsley leaves and parsnip roots, but I find parsnips give better roots and curled parsley gives better leaves

Watermelon - fails every year in the polytunnel, which is a shame as I love it

Cauliflower - when I have managed to get decent curds, the slugs or the weather have invariably got to them first. I have much more success with Romanesco, which is a cross between cauli and broccoli.

Radishes - I grow them because I feel I should, but we never eat them before they bolt

IN 😊
Celtuce - a cross between lettuce and celery. I'm going to give it a try. More in a later post if it's successful, otherwise it can quietly disappear off the list like so many other experimental crops in the past.

Blight Resistant Tomatoes - Legend, Lizzano, Mountain Magic. Growing tomatoes outside is disheartening when they suddenly get hit by blight a few weeks after it has hit the potatoes. Pretty much the whole crop is devastated and the plants have to be pulled up just as they are beginning to crop. So this year I have splashed out. At nearly £3 for six seeds (yes, SIX) they are ridiculously expensive. They are F1 too, which means the big companies have you hooked in. But a full season's harvest from just one plant would easily repay the cost.

Leek Porbella - I've been getting more and more rust on my leeks, so in an effort to break the cycle I am going to switch varieties to a more rust resistant type. Growing disease-resistant strains is one of the mainstays of organic gardening, but one which I often forget to use.

All go

Entertainment for the day involved the setting up of traffic lights outside for BT to do something to the phone lines. Mid morning my internet and phone went off. It amazes me that, with just three houses affected and about a dozen men on the job, that none of them bothered to knock on the door and politely explain what they were doing and that the service would be interrupted for a while. Just common courtesy and good public relations, but there you go.
So instead I decided to go and pick up some bales of straw. I just had to manoeuvre past the van that was parked half across my driveway and pull out in the middle of the traffic lights. Maybe my house is invisible.

I set the alarms off at the farm where I get the straw. They have been having terrible problems with hare coursers. The level of intimidation, even with the police present, is disgusting. These people are vile human beings and need locking up or worse.

Nuking the Polytunnel
With the straw unloaded, main job for the day was to spray the polytunnel with disinfectant. Not particularly nice stuff, but I need to nuke it every winter to try to get rid of the red spider mite which can devastate the plants. I then blasted every inch with a hosepipe. Most of the water seemed to end up soaking up my sleeve, dripping on my head or splashing back onto my glasses.
Tomorrow I will repeat the whole procedure.
If I could rid the tunnel of red spider mite for good I could begin to use it to hold and grow crops through the winter. As it is, we have to go for a full clear-out every year.

There was just time to take the dogs along the river before sunset. The afternoons are getting longer by the day and it won't be long before we have light evenings.

Plague and pestilence - a thoroughly disheartening affair

How dare we have a holiday!
We were only gone for just less than a week during which time a plague of pestilence and disease was wrought upon the smallholding. Well, that's a bit of an exaggeration but this is a post to show that smallholding is not always a bed of roses.

On the positive side the animals were ok. But it was a different story in the veg plot.

Blight
For the umpteenth year in a row blight has swept through my potatoes and moved onto my tomatoes. And because I wasn't here to spot it early it had a chance to kill off all the foliage on the Earlies and Second Earlies before starting on the Maincrops. There were no signs of it when we left for Scotland and by the time we returned it had ravaged the crop. The timing could not have been worse. I took the tops off all the potatoes and have left them in the ground so they don't come into  contact with any spores on the soil surface, but harvesting has been a thoroughly depressing activity, with perhaps just a quarter of the Early potatoes surviving. I haven't yet dared check the other potatoes, but am clinging onto the hope that Charlottes have been pretty blight resistant in previous years.
The blight has then moved onto the tomatoes. It enters the plants through the leaves so I have removed most of the leaves and check daily, removing all affected leaves and fruit. But once it gets into the stem you are fighting a losing battle. For some reason the plum varieties, Roma and San Marzano, seem to fare the worst. A fairly decent crop can still be salvaged from the others.

Spanish Slugs
Next on the list is slugs. More precisely the big fat orange ones which some people call Spanish slugs. The problem is they are too big and slimy for natural enemies to predate. I think the key to controlling them is to leave them no cover, but this means keeping the veg beds perfectly edged. The most effective killer of these orange slime-monsters is my edging shears - messy but effective!
Unfortunately they also seem to like living under a dense canopy of nasturtium leaves and whenever I have let these companion plants ramble it has resulted in an army of slugs attacking the crops.
So habitat destruction is proving the key to control here, as well as direct hunting out of the enemy followed by quick dispatch.

I have also released the ducks into the spare veg patch where my brassica leaves are more hole than leaf. This is in the part of the smallholding which used to be arable with the result that there is very little topsoil. The clay surface opens into wide cracks during the summer, a perfect daytime hideout for the slugs.
During my research of Spanish slugs I have come across an awful lot of poor advice on various forums, but one comment I read has reminded me of a technique which could possibly work. Apparently slugs are suckers for porridge oats, which then swell up inside them with disastrous consequences (for the slug).
I can buy sacks of porridge oats for just a few pounds and have some in stock, for the sheep love them soaked and mixed in with a few sugar beet pellets.  I would imagine the ground needs to be dry for this to work well and the oats to achieve maximum swell inside the slug, so now would be a perfect time to try.

Red Spider Mite
Third on the most unwanted list is Red Spider Mite. I nuked the polytunnel this winter but they have crept back in, though much later than in previous years. I am managing to keep them under control with weekly sprays of pyrethrum on to the most affected plants and sprays of rosemary oil mixed with eucalyptus oil and a little soap every other day in between. The trouble is you can never quite totally eradicate them.
While we were away they multiplied rapidly in the polytunnel, moving from the aubergines (always the first to be hit) onto the cucumbers (always the second). However, I have been working hard and they are back under control for the moment.



Well, that was a depressing post wasn't it. But we came back from our holiday refreshed and full of optimism. The disappointments have been shrugged off and we have been forging ahead with new projects. Hence the lack of posts recently. We really have been working very, very hard till late every evening.
More on these exciting new projects very soon.

Return of the red spider mite

GRRRRRRRRRRRRR!
They're back.

Spider mites are the peskiest of pests. There are two sorts of red spider mite, those which suck the blood of chickens and those which suck the life out of plants in the polytunnel. Neither red spider mite is red! Both are very destructive and an absolute pain to get rid of.

I first identified red spider mite in my polytunnel four years ago. These tiny arachnids multiply rapidly and in that first year weakened my Yardlong beans so much that I got virtually no crop.
One standard treatment for red spider mite is to import a biological control predator, but it's not cheap. I don't mind spending twenty quid if it gets rid of the problem, but not if it merely controls the numbers to come back every year.

In my ignorance I hoped the spider mites would vanish over the winter, but over the following two years they came back stronger each spring. Last year I'm pretty sure they got outside too as my whole bean crop was disastrous with the plants making no headway whatsoever.

So this winter I blitzed the polytunnel, spraying with Jeyes fluid (I had previously tried less aggressive solutions such as Citrox) and treating the wood with creosote. I also removed all possible overwintering homes such as bits of wood, support ropes etc. I've also been using the overhead irrigation regularly, as spider mite do not like humid conditions. The trouble is, these conditions encourage moulds too, which can be a problem when the vegetation in the tunnel inhibits air circulation.

All of this brought me success in my battle... or so I thought. My plants have grown well with none of the tell-tale signs of spider mite damage.

Luxuriant growth in the polytunnel

Growth trimmed back to allow air circulation

But then, a couple of days ago, I went to check if any of my aubergines were beginning to grow fruits and I came face to face with leaves that looked like this.

This mottled effect is caused by a

multitude of bite holes which

significantly weaken the plant and can kill it.

On very close inspection, for spider mites are absolutely tiny, I could just about see the pesky little blighters crawling along the stems.

Look very closely!

In preparation for this I had brought in some Pyrethrum, newly available as a group of producers clubbed together to pay the huge cost of getting it approved for use. I also made some rosemary oil earlier in the year, as this is supposed to be the active ingredient in some hideously expensive commercial sprays.

The pyrethrum is to be sprayed at seven day intervals. I spray it in the evening, after the bees and hoverflies have gone to bed, making sure to drench the plants and get right under the leaves. Fortunately I have caught it early so only need to do a small area of plants.
In the morning I turn on the irrigation to wash the leaves before the sun comes up and to keep conditions humid during the day.
But I am taking no chances. On the days I don't spray with pyrethrum I will use a weak rosemary oil solution. I am praying that my actions have a significant impact, as last year it was a tad demoralising.
If I don't see a change very soon the aubergine plants will go - they rarely give me a crop anyway, though I suspect that is because for some reason they seem to be extremely prone to spider mite.
Other plants which get hit are beans (I don't grow these in the tunnel any more), cucumbers and melons and, in a bad year, even the pepper plants. So far the tomato plants have seemed largely unaffected. Removing all the leaves below the developing fruits probably helps too.

Meanwhile, the harvest has started in earnest. Tomatoes are ripening and cucumbers are coming thick and fast. It looks like a very good year for melons too.

Cucumbers galore