The Christmas potatoes had all come up and so I filled in the trench that they are planted in with the idea of in a couple of week’s they will show up again and I can bank them up.
A bitty morning, a lot of hoeing to start with which seems a good way to determine what’s what. The cabbage plants we put in last week had not done too well, slugs and the heat mostly I think. From the six we put in there were four left with one of them quite eaten. I firmed them up a bit, put down some slug pellets and gave them a bit of a watering.
One thing I wanted to do was to tidy up the strawberries, they are producing runners all over the place and even though I have pulled them off in the past they are still coming. A mixture of potting some and putting others on the compost. A small bit of weeding and the job was done.
I had a go at redoing the netting on the calabrese and kale, and failed to make much of a difference. I’ll return with cable ties and redo it in the same way as I have with the sprouts. The kale versus caterpillar battle is over, and I won, we now have more kale than we know what to do with it. It turns out a “kale salsa” is a bit strange, an interesting meal but I won’t do it again.
I cut down the broad bean plants, we have a clear bed now which I will cover in mushroom compost once we have picked up some more. I borrowed a wheel barrow to pick up some of the wood chip that no-one else has used, I’ve just piled it up for now but I’ll use it by the entrance of the plot at some time.
I firmed up the swede and turnip plants, both have doubled in size over the last week. I also mulched one of the rhubarb plants which has suddenly come alive. The runner beans I was thinking of getting rid of as they keep falling over and we have only had 2 beans off of them; but we spotted new beans. We picked three, and there are plenty of flowers for a lot more, it seems after a very dry summer they have decided finally to do something. I noticed most other plots have removed their poor runner beans, maybe they should have left them.
We came home with:
- beetroot (getting a bit too large now, probably only a couple of week’s worth left, but baby ones growing)
- radish
- french beans (they keep appearing in small numbers
- runner beans
- kale
- rhubarb
- salad leaves
- rocket
At home I have finally got rid of the tomato plants which have been giving us millions of cherry tomatoes for a couple of months now. To start with it was just one or two a day, then suddenly it was thousands a day, and then it was millions a day. The plants seemed to come to their end, all a bit droopy and dead looking, for the last week I have been picking off tomatoes that looked like they were starting to change colour, picking them and putting them on the window sill where they went fully red after a day. This saved them from being eaten off of the plant by slugs. Today, it was looking all a bit untidy and so I decided to pick everything that looked a suitable size regardless of the colour, put them all on the window sill, and remove the plants. We now have tomatoes all over the place in the house in different stages of colour. More of these next year.
Sweet peppers have been at home too. We had a pepper plant disaster where four plants became three rather suddenly in the middle of the night when the wind got up, blow the blind which in turn pushed the plant off the window sill. Bang, and a pepper plant snapped and all over the floor. A sad time. We rescued the peppers and the remains of the plant are outside, it is regrowing but it won’t have any more peppers on it. The remaining plants are well, even the one downstairs that has suffered a lot with greenfly. Over the last week they have all started to turn red, they do it so quickly that you can almost watch them change…
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