Blustery weather exposes the weaknesses of cheap polytunnels and may redistribute the ownership of lightweight equipment like garden bags and polythene. Make sure any weed-suppression fabric or polythene is well-weighted-down. Cheap polytunnels and lightweight cold frames may need extra anchoring; the kind of spiral pegs used by fishermen and campers are good.
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Anyone who was out and about early on Sunday will realise we have had the first frost. This was an evaporation frost, usually known as a 'ground frost' or, as the weather forecasters are increasingly saying, a 'grass frost', and it didn't kill even tender things like courgettes. Crops under cover in polytunnels and greenhouses will be unharmed.
However, it was a bit of a shock to the system after the summery weather we've been enjoying. Once night temperatures fall below 5degC most plants accpet that winter is one the way and a range of physiological changes take place, most obvious of which is that many more tender plants just stop growing. Others, such as carrots, cabbages and so on, are adapted to cold conditions and will carry on growing happily. Plants start to turn their starch food stores to cold-resistant sugars, which is why sprouts and parsnips only start to taste nice after a frost or two. For more detailed info about and how it affects your gardening click here. The phrase 'Indian Summer'. used to describe a period of warm weather in early autumn, links us to the earliest settlers in America, who copied the local Indians in using this spell of fine weather to harvest and ripen the crops which would feed them through the bitter New England winters.
Winter (or autumn) squash were one of the harvests which were most important both to the Native Americans and the settlers. they knew the squash had tobe taken from the plant and put in a sunny place for the skins to 'cure' and the insides to finish ripening. The process not only improved the falvour, it insured the squash would keep for as long as possible. Copy the 'Red Indians' and cure your squash in a sunny place. It is probably best to take them home to do this, as they will be safer there. Trim away and soft portion of stem and lay them on a bench or even a shed roof, where the air can circulate and the skins dry. Then store them in a dry, frost-free shed until you are ready to eat them. For more about harvesting and storing squash, click here to go to an article from North Carolina State University! If you have planted your potatoes in spring, no doubt they are all lifted and stored by now. There is no advantage in leaving them in the ground a minute after the haulm has died down, as it only leaves them vulnerable to slug attack.
If you have planted potatoes late because you have recently taken on your plot, or if you are trying out planting late summer for new potatoes in the autumn, you need to be aware that there is a very great deal of blight around right now, and the humid warm conditions mean it will spread quickly. Potato blight also affects outdoor tomatoes. It is worth taking extra care not to allow blight to infest your plot from year to year. You can protect potatoes, as well as tomatoes, from blight by spraying with Bordeaux mixture. Click here for a particularly clear article on potato blight. For more about Bordeaux mixture click here. For our own page on growing potatoes click here The recent spell of cooler weather has meant some crops like courgettes have calmed down a bit. We will no doubt get a warm spell afterwards - this is Kent and really scorching temperatures are common till late in September. However, the allotment is starting to look 'end of season' and soon we will be thinking about clearing all that lush growth away. At this time of year even the most capacious compost heaps can become overfull. Take the time to plan ahead and you can keep things neat and save yourself work. First, get the compost heap rotting down as fast as possible. You've already put all the early summer peas and beans on it, plus stuff from your back garden. When weeding, don't shake all the soil off the weed roots - valuable bacteria are in there and by putting a little soil in the heap you 'inocculate' it with a starter culture of everything you need for good composting. Feed those bacteria with some nitrates; you can use fresh manure, pelleted chicken manure, proprietary compost activator or even human wee (a traditional starter substance) if the fancy takes you. Too much manure can make your compost heap acidic and slow the composting process. If using actual manure, alternate applications of manure with sprinklings of garden lime. a layer of vegetable matter, some manure, another layer of vegetable matter, some lime . . . Not everything you clear up has to go on the heap. Some of it can be composted in trenches, and now is a good time to start. Work out where your runner beans or courgettes are going to go next spring and dig a trench there. Dig a trench across the patch you intend to use, making it roughly 2-3ft (60cm-1m) wide. Go down until you reach subsoil - you'll recognise this because it is denser, and usually lighter in colour. Using a fork, roughen up the subsoil bottom very slightly - no need to break your back. The soil you've taken out of this hole will look like a lot more than what you would expect to fit; pile it on one side or on either side of the hole. Fill your trench with any organic matter you can get your hands on - spud peelings, grass clippings, dead-headings from the garden, fresh manure picked up by the bag. (See below - "Foraging for organic matter"). The only things you shouldn't put in are:
For more composting tips, click here Well, it's too late for me. I thought I'd treated them the same as every previous year, when I'd always had good results. In essence, I had treated them the same - but I'd forgotten to take account of the difference a very wet winter makes! Phytophthora is an unpronouncable family of fungus diseases that affect a wide variety of plants - potato blight is just one of them. The fungus which attacks pepper plants lives in the soil, and thrives in damp conditions. My pepper plants are in the ground, and usually I have to water them like billy-ho as the sub soil is, by late summer, sucking up every drop I pour on. This year is different, though! The soil is fully charged with moisture and conditions are ripe for Phytophthora to flourish. The first sign is a branch, or, sadly, a whole plant, suddenly wilting catastrophically. The fungus has got into the tissues near the base and has either traveled up the water tubes or girdled the whole plant, cutting off the supply of water and killing the tissues. The fatal sign is a brown soft mushy-looking section. If only a branch is affected, you may be able to cut ot off and save the rest of the plant. Good luck - mine are doomed, and all because we are so used to dry weather here I never even thought to check about the watering requirements of peppers! What I now know is that I should have let the soil dry out well, till dry two inches down, before watering. Watering every day - essential for tomatoes - is not so good for peppers! The disease stays in the soil, but as I change the soil in my greenhouse beds every year, as well as rotating the crops, I hope to do better next year! For more about preventing pepper blight, click here. Planting potatoes now for autumn cropping is relatively new. It means you can be harvesting new potatoes at a time of year when we'd normally only have old, stored potatoes. Specially prepared tubers are more expensive than ordinary seed potatoes; to get the best value from them consider growing in a potato bag or raised bed. You will get a far heavier crop from a small number of tubers like this than from growing them the traditional way. You do not need to buy a special bag, you can easily rig something up with a large plastic compost sack or even one of those 'bulk bags' which building supplies come in. (Click here for more about using 'bulk bags' as a raised bed) Autumn-planting seed potatoes are available from Harringe Plants at Sellinge (the Potten Farm site), as well as other outlets. Varieties available are Maris Peer (slug resistant), Pentland Javelin (scab and eelworm resistant), and Charlotte (firm and waxy). Harringe Plants are an independent owner-run nursery and well worth a visit. When you spend your money at local independent retailers, it stays in the community instead of finding its way to offshore accounts owned by multimillionaires! Click here if you'd like to go to their facebook page and learn more. If your plot needs clearing and digging, you may have been telling yourself "Oh, there's nothing I can do till autumn". But that's NOT TRUE! In a normal year, the heavy rain we had at the beginning of the week would have vanished. But because the subsoil is still soaked from the winter, the topsoil is lovely and moist RIGHT NOW. The surface may look dry, but less than an inch below that surface there's moist dark soil which you will find surprisingly easy to get a fork into.
So instead of waiting for autumn's short, cold days, make the most of the pleasant summer weather and get out there with tools. If you don't like the heat, then an early morning trip, or an hour or two in the pleasant evening temperatures, is a bliss and a joy. There is no need to water any plants you've already got growing (unless they are very newly planted) so you can concentrate your energy on the bits that badly need attention. All the weeds you fork out can be composted (whatever the books say, it all rots down and you need that humus), and in no time at all you'll have ground ready to sow lettuce, spinach, beetroot, late carrots or even pop in a few cauliflower or broccoli plants. Instead of waiting till next year to enjoy the fruit of your labours, you can be eating your own veg this autumn! Spells of warm, humid weather mean blight. Blight is a fungus disease, spread by rain and wind, affecting both potatoes and tomatoes. The first signs are small patches of brown on the foliage, with the damaged areas drying and shrinking. Click on the pic (left) to go to the RHS advice page. Blight can be prevented by spraying with Bordeaux Mixture - a post which said Bordeaux mixture was to be withdrawn, on this page, was MISTAKEN - your website compiler was reading info on the RHS website wrong. There have been a number of attempts to withdraw Bordeaux mixture over the years but it is still currently available. If you spray with Bordeaux mixture you will need to re-apply it after rain! On tomatoes, pick off any affected leaves and burn or bin them (don't compost diseased material), spraying with bordeaux mixture to stop it spreading. Tomatoes in greenhouses, protected from the rain, are less vulnerable. If your potatoes have already formed a decent crop - and I don't know about you, but my 'first earlies' are the size of maincrop, while my 'second earlies' rival some of the smaller moons of Jupiter - then you can simply cut off all the foliage and bin it. Thus will stop the blight migrating down to the spuds and you can lift them in your own time. If there is any suggestion that blight might be about, store your potatoes in hessian sacks rather than paper. If you don't have a nice dark cellar (how many of us have one of those?) Then use the sacks double to keep out the light. This disease has been a problem in the past few years. Tips of onion leaves go yellowish, then a grey-white mould spreads down the leaves. Commercially available fungicides don't control it, unfortunately.
To reduce the risk, grow onions from seed not sets. Avoid keeping your own shallots over to plant again the next year (the only onions affected on my patch so far are the shallots I saved from last year to plant). Space plants well apart. If watering, do so early morning not last thing in the evening. Of course, your onions are in this year and none of that advice is any help. You can pick off the affected leaves ( put them out for the black bin rubbish, DON'T compost them! ) and some experienced gardeners say a 'foliar feed' with Bordeaux mixture helps prevent infection. Bordeaux mixture is available from the Trading Store and from the more specialist garden suppliers. Reports it was to be withdrawn were incorrect. |
Kent's climate is drier, hotter and has a longer growing season than the average for the UK. Advice in gardening books may not fit Kent. This blog has local tips on what will grow and when to do garden jobs.
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December 2015
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