Out of the frying pan!

After what seems  to be an age of bemoaning cold, wet, conditions, this week saw Blightwatch messages pinging into our mailbox. The warm humid conditions are ideal for the spread of the fungal spores that attack potatoes and tomatoes. To be honest once the spores find your crops there's not much you can do to stop an attack. One thing though is to try and avoid wetting the leaves of the plants when watering.

Then if this isn't bad enough, we have also noticed that some of the tomato plants growing in our plot greenhouse are showing signs of being affected by herbicide contamination of the compost in the grow bags, This is an issue that has been affecting gardeners for at least 11 years but incredibly many gardeners are still unaware of the problem. Each year newly affected gardeners react as though this is something new and social media is full of outraged comments but nothing changes and the chemical companies and compost manufacturers carry on regardless. If you want to find out more about this scourge I have an earlier blog post here and if you want to read more then I devoted a whole section of my website to the problem which can be found here.

Bad things come in threes, apparently, and our third challenge comes from the ever present garden pests. The woodpigeons are showing their displeasure towards us for netting the brassica plants, and for the first time have started attacking our dahlias. They are attacking both the leaves and the flowers! Strangely blackfly have also taken a fancy to the dahlias and the cardoon, whereas plants such as broad beans and nasturtiums are being ignored.

Anyway let's not dwell on the negatives. Much of the work done on the allotment this week has been tidying up and protecting crops.

We finished covering the old strawberry bed - just in time really before the hot weather baked the ground and turned it back into concrete.

The new strawberry plants were sending out masses of runners. As I don't want the plants wasting energy growing baby plants rather than concentrating on producing delicious berries, I cut all of these off, except for one which has been trained to root where the plant originally occupying the space failed. Of course, the day after, the plants were determinedly sending out new runners.

24 June

It is now officially brassica season on our plot. Cauliflower - Helsinki is featuring heavily in our meal planning. It's finding it's way into stir fries and curries as well as being used as a side vegetable. Even then we couldn't keep up so some has been frozen. Cabbage - Regency is vying for attention, but we hope that will hang on longer than the cauliflower would in the current warm weather but we are harvesting some for coleslaw.

26 June

Autumn planted onions - Radar are being harvested as required. We use lots of onions in our recipes but they should see us through to when the spring planted bulbs are ready.  Incredibly we are still using last year's shallots which have so far remained firm.

27 June

The soft fruit is beginning to ripen and attracting the attention of various birds so whilst, Martyn strimmed the grass I covered our precious blueberries. We are willing to share the rest of the fruit with the birds but the blueberries are ours!

At the moment the Sweetheart strawberries are providing our main strawberry harvest, although the later, Elegance is catching up. The other fruit shown above, picked on 27 June, are our first pickings of purple, Glencoe raspberries and a few gooseberries. We also picked a few redcurrants.

29 June

On Saturday, I noticed that the woodpigeons were homing in on the jostaberries so I quickly picked a few that had ripened and then more that had ripened on Sunday. There were also a few red raspberries to add to the purple ones.

30 June

We harvested a root each of two varieties of early potato - Casablanca and Rocket and were pleased with both despite Rocket really being grown as a sacrificial crop in a newly cleared bed.

The Aquiles, calabrese are now forming side shoots which are adding to our brassica haul.

We didn't photograph the cabbage and cauliflower given to a friend who paid us a visit at just the right time. A cauliflowers was also taken for my sister, we've enough to share as long as it's not sharing blueberries with the blackbirds.

Finally I managed to cut a couple of posies of cut flowers including some dahlias that had escaped the woodpigeons' attention.

If you are interested I posted a video tour of the allotment on our vlog, it can be viewed here

There are also one or two new harvesting videos see here.

Our complete monthly harvests are listed here.

This week I am linking to harvest Monday hosted on 

Dave's blog Our Happy Acres

By the way, Walton's are running a competition to win a shed which you may be interested in entering - if so it can be found here.

Thanks to those who responded to my invitation to make a comment. I appreciate you taking the trouble to say hello. I know I get lots of visitors who never comment and I'd love to know who you are - unlike the annoying spammers who can't seem to grasp that their comments go straight into my spam folder and never see the light of day.

You don't have to have your own blog in order to join in conversations. It may seem that everyone who comments knows one another but bloggers always welcome new commenters, after all that is how we all started.

It iACopyright: Original post from Our Plot at Green Lane Allotments http://glallotments.blogspot.co.uk/ author S Garrett