Exercising the podding finger and clopyralid damage update,

On Friday, last week we had what, Martyn would call 'proper rain' and it just so happened that this was the day that the two senior biologists from Corteva came to visit. Imagine the scene, four of us squeezed into our 6x8 plot greenhouse. They immediately confirmed what we suspected which was that our tomato plants had been affected by hormone weedkiller residue. Also as we suspected this was most likely to be caused by clopyralid residue in the grow bags that was transferred to the compost in the green waste used in the production. They stayed for about three quarters of an hour chatting about the problems and answering our questions and took away a couple of samples to analyse. As we have always thought, the testing may or may not confirm that clopyralid residue is present. As just a tiny amount can affect plant growth locating that amount in a grow bag is difficult to say the least. I've still not received acknowledgement from Levingtons that they have received the sample that we sent on 8 July. On our visitor's suggestion we have now also emailed the garden centre from which we purchased the grow bags. We've put together a video of the information gleaned from the visit and I will also dedicate a blog post to the problem shortly.

We have managed some work on the plot although we did have a day or two off.  One was to pay one of our regular visits to Yorkshire Wildlife Park. The painted dogs had given birth to pups and we hoped to catch a glimpse of them. We were in luck. Their cuteness belies the fact that the will grow up to be fearsome predators.

With flying freeloaders around the meerkats were wise to post lookouts.

There are plenty of youngsters in the garden too. They soon learn where the nearest well stocked dining area is and our feeders are emptying quickly.

Excuse the poor quality but the above were taken from a window in poor light conditions

At the allotment, we caught a glimpse of another young bird. I think it's a juvenile green woodpecker. If so, it is the first we have seen locally. The only other one we have seen was in France.

It has mainly been a  week of tidying and harvesting, both on the allotment and in the garden. It's amazing how quickly once the beds are fully planted that we start clearing them again. Martyn cleared our first brassica bed which will soon be planted up with a late sowing of dwarf French beans.

The climbing beans have been slow to get going but at last some are producing flowers.

I tied in some new growth from the most vigorous of our new raspberries.

My pod popping finger had plenty of exercise last week. We harvested all the broad (fava) beans from the first sowing of De Monica - video here. (I can't hear the words fava beans without thinking of Hannibal Lecter). We also pulled over two bucketfuls of peas from our first sowing of Onward. These have now been frozen to be enjoyed throughout the year.

15 July

 We dug the first of our trial potatoes, a variety called Premiere - video here -which we were impressed with. We also dug the first of our Athlete potatoes - shown in the last photo. They looked good and had produced a good harvest. They haven't been tasted yet, but if they pass the taste test we will be spoiled for choice of early potatoes next year.

18 July

Before, Martyn cleared the brassica bed, it yielded the last of its crop - a cabbage and a couple of small cauliflowers.

19 July

We picked the first of our Sugar Snap peas and some small courgettes all of which went into a stir fry. A couple of courgette plants have disappeared,  so it's a good job that we didn't stick to Monty Don's two plants to one person rule or Martyn would have been courgetteless.

21 July

The berries keep on coming. Along with the usual varieties, we have had the first picking of blackcurrants. It's a tedious and time consuming job but well worth it.

Finally, the stems of the dahlias and sweet peas are now a better length. My favourite sweet pea at the moment is a variety called Heathcliff. It's a dark blue and, unusually for a dark colour, it has a wonderful perfume. We haven't grown it before but I'd certainly give it a place on next year's list

Our complete monthly harvests are listed here.

This week I am linking to harvest Monday hosted on 

Dave's blog Our Happy Acres

UPDATE video update after meeting with Corteva is posted 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.

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