Harvesting & Caterpillars

Well the recent weather has hardly been glorious of late. At least it’s not as bad as last year when only the rice growers were happy. On the plus side, we’re not getting as much rain as those poor people in Ireland. I watched that on the news and was heartily glad not to be in the flooded underpass they featured every bulletin.

Not that I’m a great news watcher, but with the Georgia situation I thought it prudent to see if it was time to pack the survival kit and head for the hills before the missiles start flying. Maybe those people who turned the nuclear command bunker in Nantwich into a tourist attraction will have the last laugh.

Anyway, back to the plot. We’ve not got a lot done apart from harvesting. I’ve been watering in the greenhouse, of course. It always seems a bit mad watering when the skies look about ready to open but I think you have to be a bit mad to garden anyway. For a start are we ever happy? The sun blazes down and we all complain it’s too hot to work, the lettuce are bolting and we could do with some rain. Then it rains and we moan everything is too wet, we could do with some sunshine to bring things on and the lettuce are bolting because who wants to eat salads in this weather.

The peppers have been doing really well, some of them are huge. We’ve taken some off the plants just because of the weight pulling down the plants. The tomatoes are ripening like mad as well and we have enough cucumbers to open up a shop.

As for beans, well when it gets to three carrier bags full in a weekend, you have to wonder if we’ve too many plants. Yet last year, my runners were pale spindly things with not a bean in sight.

Don’t even think about courgettes. Luckily we managed to give a load away to some new plotholders. Haha – that’ll teach them to say they like courgettes, ‘Have a carrier bag full!’

Still not got the spuds lifted. I’m just hoping we get a dry day later this week. Well a couple of dry days would be better. I hate harvesting potatoes when the soil’s wet. It becomes such a mucky job.

My brassicas were a mixed blessing. Some of the cabbages would have benefited from being harvested a week ago, and the pak choi would certainly have been better. It’s great, you keep the pigeons off and the slugs sneak underneath the netting to have a good munch.

Just in case the slugs don’t get them, the caterpillars will. I went through all the cauliflowers on plot 5 and carefully checked. Some leaves had eggs in their neat little rows, others had whole battalions of caterpillars munching away.

I know you can spray with various things from biological controls to pesticides, but being Mr Mean, I just picked them off by hand, rubbing the eggs out. It’s a shame really, I do love butterflies but I also like to have some crops please.

My swedes are looking well, last year they were a joke but this year they’ve gone right. Incidentally, I was reading a book the other night that referred to rutabagas. Well I was racking my brains but since I was reading in bed, it had to wait for the morning. For the benefit of my North American visitors, rutabaga = swede. Or should that be swede = rutabaga. Oh I dunno, anyway it was a good book about a man and a wolf

With having friends over last week, I’d not paid too much attention to the brassicas in the coldframe at home. They’d been watered, of course, but otherwise ignored. It seems a coldframe is no deterrent to the butterflies. If anything they were worse than the ones on the plot.

So the lesson is, check frequently for eggs which are easier and less icky to deal with than masses of caterpillars. Still came home with eight cabbages.

Talking of lessons. Val & I have been checking the freezers. We appear to have a year’s supply of sweetcorn in stock as well as enough broad beans for a decade, plus some red cabbage. That’s just one of our freezers. I think we have the European Vegetable Mountain.

Posted in Allotment Garden Diary

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