Spuds still wilting

With this sweltering weather it’s a never ending problem keeping the spuds sufficiently watered. A week ago I had the hosepipe pouring into each bag for 45 seconds each but I noticed at lunchtime today that they are wilting again so I’ll have to repeat the process. If you don’t keep them well watered you can get some strange looking tubers with thin waists or pointy nose ends rather than the classic kidney or round shape.

My spuds have been in since late April to mid May and you can reckon on 12-16 weeks depending on the variety so I’ll be getting these up in the next few weeks. I shall nip off any flowers as they form so that all energies continue to go into the developing tubers. When the haulms start to go yellow I will cut them off a couple of inches above compost level and then take the bags and pots into the garage where I won’t touch them for a week. If you empty them out straight away the skins are very soft and will peel off easily, rendering them useless for showing. Leaving them for a week allows the skins to harden.

One evening towards the end of July or into early August I’ll then empty out all the bags and pots and sort my spuds into sets but I won’t wash them straight away. Instead I will pack them away in the same compost that they were growing in until the night before the show. They are usually the last thing that I wash so that they look as fresh as possible on the benches. And they will only be good for one show so don’t try keeping them for any later shows….they soon deteriorate.

Long carrots starting to grow...

.....at last! These have really struggled the past month and I'm beginning to think there's nothing to be gained from an early sowing. In future I think I may as well opt for a late April or even early May sowing date. It won't get me whoppers but it should give me more even growth and more uniformly tapered roots in better condition.

I've also been asked about watering your long carrots. Dave Thornton of the NVS is adamant that the only water his gets once they're growing away well is what falls from the sky. In Medwyn's column in GN this week he advocates keeping the top of the compost moist but I think this only applies to those roots that are growing in polytunnels. He really doesn't explain things particularly well at times.

I do know stump carrots are different and I try and give them a sprinkling of water every few days so that they don't dry out. If they do you can get roots that are 'wasp waisted' part way down the root......i.e. thinner than the bottom and top. But long roots need to be encouraged to go down in search of moisture. Even when the surface is dust dry (not BONE dry!) if you scratch down a few inches you'll be surprised how damp the sand can be.

Even better than last year

As I was totally and utterly brilliant last year with my parsnips 'Pinnacle' I was hoping to build on it this year and I haven't been disappointed. The foliage is way bigger than it was at the same stage last season with really thick stems so it should be hiding some whopping specimens below. There is no way these can be watered from above as the foliage is too dense but when they look this good it proves there is no need. The tap root is now well down into the sand and drawing on the moisture deep down. If the roots are as clean as they were last season I'm confident of a few red cards with these come August & September.

Onions slow to bulb

Had a call from a fellow grower last night and he's having similar problems. Now we've got past the longest day and the nights are getting longer they should start to swell but it's going to be well into August before I can harvest my biggest onions, which won't give them long enough to ripen for the first shows I feel.














My onions for the 8oz class (Vento and Tasco) should be on time however, and I think I'll be harvesting my first by the middle of July no problems.

Well that's one less kiddy fiddling nutcase in the World!

Damn.....they stole my idea!!!!!

I've suddenly realised that some people in high places must read my blog as the lead story in Garden News this week is about the lottery winner who cannot grow carrots.

So, with this in mind this week I'd like to talk about rude shaped vegetables and vegetables as sex aids. (Go on GN...I dare you! LOL)

Nervous.....

Got several members of a local horticultural society coming round on Thursday evening to look over the plot and hopefully pick up some tips for their own show. I hope I can give them some help and advice and don't let myself down......but the garden looks good anyway.

Celery growing reasonably

I'm only growing 5 plants in the garden (and another half dozen up the allotment) as I only need 2 for Sturton way ahead in October. I've never been a great celery grower and lost all my plants last season to some strange rust disease that rendered them hopeless for showing. So far I have no sign of this showing, nor celery leaf miner which is a pest that burrows into the leaflets and makes them quite unsightly..

I have very loose collars on them....actually 6" bottomless plant pots but I'll be putting a 10" loose collar on them soon.

In the nick of time

I was going to leave my biggest shallots for another few days but you know when you get a feeling and something tells you to look again? Well I did and I noticed some of them had started to get out of shape. They were all fine when I looked on Friday so it does appear to be quite a rapid transformation.

Timing does seem to be a very important factor in show veg so I harvested the whole damn lot and managed to salvage the majority......including these huge 'Longor'. They do have flat edges where they were in contact with their brothers and sisters but Dave Thornton who I now consider to be my vegetable guru and who knows absolutely everything when it comes to show veg (big headed twat) insists that they round up during the drying out process. If that is true then I reckon I could be onto a winner with these and I will consider offering to have his babies.

A confession

I've been putting this off for some time but I'm bound to be asked sooner or later. You remember that huge onion I was given in order to set it for seed? Well, in less than 9 months I've managed to reduce it from this....


















To this....














Yes I'm afraid it is an ex-onion. Now all I have to do is explain my incompetence to the guy who gave it to me!

Truth is it never really got away in the autumn when I planted it in a large pot in my conservatory. I'm wondering whether it was on the cold side and it had started to rot from day one. Either way it's not an easy thing to do with a bulb of that size so I'll just have to rely on someone else's expertise in the future and get my seed and plants from people who know what they're doing.


However, I'm not the only one suffering from onion heartbreak. Poor old Dan is suffering from botritis on some his biggest bulbs....

http://www.allotment-diary.co.uk/Giant-exhibition-onion-2009.html

I feel your PAIN Dan! Hang in there!

What lies beneath?

It's really satisfying this season to see some really healthy looking potato tops. Here I have a couple of rows of Maxine, one Pixie and one Kestrel.

Hopefully, I'll have plenty of good sized tubers swelling in the bags as I've not had any worth exhibiting the past couple of seasons due to blight and incompetence.

I've also got all my labels ready in the garage for each set for the various shows, graded into the order of priority. For instance I've got about 7 dishes that I absolutely must be able to exhibit, another 7 or so that are my 2nd most important dishes and so on....right down to those dishes that I'm not too fussed about....if I have enough tubers I'll sort some for those but they won't be as good as my top sets.

I also have labels marked spare Pixie, spare Kestrel etc. These will be all those tubers that are good but don't quite match up to others so I'll maybe use these in my trugs.

Sparse beetroot germination

Something I've not experienced before.......I'm usually thinning out the excess seedlings but this year I'm having to dot in more seed in the gaps.

I always run a plank of wood along the soil to make a 'V' shaped trench and water this well. I then place the seeds about 3" apart (Red Ace is a monogerm variety.....1 plant per seed) and cover the seed with compost. This way I can see where the rows are and the seeds come through the fine compost very quickly....usually!

Keep on running

A long way to go for my runner beans, Blyton Sabre a variety bred by Les Stothard. The seeds were absolutely enormous. The earliest sowings are now about a metre high. No sign of blackfly as yet.















These are the later sowings, barely 4" high. These will cover the later shows I hope.















Of all the runner bean plants in all the world....you had to crap on mine! Where are the cats when you need them?

Shallot harvesting time

A strange thing happened with my shallots this season....my own reselected strain grew a lot, lot bigger than they ever have before, even bigger than the ones I acquired from Dave Thornton. It's almost as if they realised they were on borrowed time and had to perform this year or else!

They're now drying off on this mesh rack. The ones at the top of the frame are my own strain and those at the bottom from the 'DT' bulbs. I still have 50+ of my own bulbs to dig up and harvest and I have some clonkers in amongst them. As long as they round up nicely during the ripening process all should be good. I now leave all the foliage on until it dies back. The bulbs will all have flat faces on them where they've been in contact with their neighbours. I'm assured they will round up during the drying out. I also no longer press the developing bulbs apart in early May. I always thought I was doing good by helping them grow apart from the other bulbs they were touching but now I think it just causes them to stop growing in size.














I also have a row of 'Longor' to harvest which is a french longue type. When I saw them growing in the kitchen garden at Doddington Hall last summer I thought they had potential to be a show variety, and so far so good. They've also grown into large bulbs albeit with a more elongated shape. I know a similar variety 'Jermor' has won at the highest level so it'll be interesting to see how I do with these.

Meanwhile this wooden planking frame that I grew some of my shallots in (with mixed success.....I should have planted the DT bulbs in my more established onion bed) will be revamped with some general fertilisers and planted up with some french beans. These should be fruiting in time for the August/September shows.

Sod off Sir Alex.....

This is the £25m Euro lottery winning allotment gardener from Bolton who says he wants to spend some of his fortune learning

how to grow carrots as it's something he's never been able to do.

I feel it's my duty to offer my services to this marvellous man. A million or so should suffice....I'm not greedy!

Look no further Sir Alex!

Smithyveg! readers may be interested to know that I still play football every other week. After scoring four magnificent goals last Friday night Mr. Ferguson may be wise to invest some of his recently acquired £80m on a fat, balding 45 year old veg grower from the Loughborough area who can still swing his magical right peg and send some bullets into the opposition goal. The fact that he walks around like a retarded amputee for several days afterwards really is neither here nor there!

More mackling by moonlight!

Tonight I 'mackled' together these rather spiffing wooden frames which each hold a load of plastic trays. I intend to store my shallots and 8oz onions here once I have graded them into various sets......pickling shallots under 30mm dia(NVS rules), pickling shallots under 25mm dia. (RHS rules), exhibition shallots over 30mm dia, and Tasco and Vento onions once harvested. In past years my onions and shallots and been in a variety of boxes all over the damned place so this should allow me to be an awful lot more organised in the run up to each show.

By moonlight tonight I took some pictures of my first dahlias planted out........

........a rather worrying collapse on one of my Sweet Candle stumps.....obviously some form of virus perhaps introduced by aphids........bugger,tit,knob!

.....and my red cabbage 'Autoro', from one of which I had to pick off a huge green caterpillar and dispose off 'a la size 9'.

These carrots growing in pots will soon need transplanting. Carrots in pots I hear you say! Yes...a variety bred specifically to grow huge so it doesn't matter if it forks.....in fact the more forks the merrier. When I pricked them out I actually cut the tap root in half to encourage forking. I grow 4 plants purely for Sturton which has a class for Heaviest carrot', although having said that I won it last year with one of my show carrots that had just grown oversize.

And in my front garden I have this completely gorgeous peony 'Bowl of Beauty' which is out now and makes you smile when you walk up the garden path after a hard day in the office dealing with complete wankers all day long.

What a difference a week makes.

Went walking yesterday in Staffordshire and it was a total washout. We all got absolutely drenched. It was exactly 20degrees C cooler than it was this time last week. British weather eh?

Today has been even worse but at least all of my water butts have got filled up which is handy. In between the showers I took the opportunity to make this rather strange framework over my marrows. All will (I hope!) be revealed during the season as my marrows are trained up and along it so that the developing fruits hang down and get an even green colour all round, with no damage to the skins.

My parsnips continue to please the eye although as ever I have to watch out for those bloody aphids.

My first tomatoes have the first flower trusses showing........

.....so I have my home-made liquid feeds ready. Red caps for comfrey (potash) and green caps for nettles (nitrogen) which I will use in rotation with the shopbought tomato feeds. I always start feeding as soon as the first fruit is the size of a pea, watering into the sunken plastic bottles next to each plant.

My potato foliage is a hundred times better than last year's disaster but I will have to keep an eye out on the blight forecast. In anticipation I sprayed them all with Dithane today.

These are my own shallots which have grown much bigger than I have ever got them in the past. These should provide me with the better, more uniform sets as the ones from the Dave Thornton bulbs have, I noticed tonight, only produced about 6 overly large ones, the rest being only average size. They don't seem to have carried on growing as well as my own. I obviously can't grow them as well as he can!

I'm also very pleased with the 'Longor' variety, and will be very interested to see what shape they ripen up into. They will all be lifted in about a fortnight.....more on that then.

And today my first rose came out despite the rain......always a sure sign to me that summer is here.

As he stood in front of the Pearly Gates, a man saw a huge wall of clocks
behind St Peter. He asked, 'What are all those clocks?'
St. Peter answered, 'Those are Lie-Clocks. Everyone on earth has a
Lie-Clock. Every time you lie the hands on your clock move.'
'Oh', said the man. 'Whose clock is that?'
'That's Mother Teresa 's', replied St. Peter . 'The hands have never
moved, indicating that she never told a lie.'
'Incredible', said the man. 'And whose clock is that one?'
St. Peter responded, 'That's Abraham Lincoln 's clock. The hands have
moved twice, telling us that Abraham told only two lies in his entire life.'
'Where's Gordon Brown 's clock?' asked the man.
'Brown's clock is in Jesus’ office. He's using it as a ceiling fan.'

Cheers mate

Had a visit to my garden tonight from dahlia growing 'royalty' in the guise of Kev Broxholme who kindly bought me some dahlia plants of Kenora Sunset and Jomanda as I had failed to get any of mine to shoot. One reason could be that I had 'blind' tubers which can occur when you've taken too much of the parent tuber when taking the cuttings last year. I think a more likely scenario was that I left my tubers in the cold greenhouse too late in the year and they just rotted. I shall be planting these gratefully received donations to the Smithyveg cause this weekend.

I have managed to root some 'poms' (again from tubers Kev gave me last autumn) but these won't be ready to plant for another fortnight or so. So all in all I won't have an awful lot of plants but as long as I have the odd vase for Sutton Bonington, Seagrave and Sturton I'll be happy.

I've just got in from the garden where it has only just got dark at 10pm......I love these long days when you can really get some jobs done. Tonight I've pricked out some trays of bedding plants for the flower borders. This weekend I'll need to finish off all my other flower planting which will just leave the odd marrow and french beans to plant in the next couple of weeks. I shall be sowing my first cucumbers this weekend.

Kev remarked at how small my tomato plants were but to me they looked fine because I time all my veg to come good during a very small 'window' from late August to early October. This means we have an absolute glut of veg and a only a small percentage of it will end up on our table. A big freezer comes into play then, but we inevitably have to give (or throw) an awful lot away. The madness of the show grower eh?

Phew, what a scorcher!

Great weather for camels but not for spuds! The scorching weekend sunshine had made my spud tops droop so after topping up the bags with more compost I gave each one at least half a watering can of water which took an awful long time to do. But I was rewarded for my efforts as the foliage perked up almost instantly and I swear they've grown an inch overnight.

My onions have started to get a move on at long last, but with only two months until I need to be harvesting them I'm not going to break any weight records. The plants in the pots are aubergines......yes I know I said I wasn't going to bother growing them ever again!!!!

I planted my first runner bean plants of 'Blyton Sabre' at the weekend and also set some more bean seeds 'in situ' to cover the later shows.

These are my first planting of peas 'Show Perfection'. Peas are a '20 pointer' vegetable as it's notoriously difficult to stage a good set in August/September because most late sowings succumb to mildew. To get good peas you need to grow 'cordon style' up a bamboo cane and snip off all the tendrils. The means the plants energies are diverted to producing the pods but also means tying or clipping the plant to the cane almost daily. The flowers are cut off until about 21-28 days before the show.

Watch out for those aphids.....

I'd grown a little concerned these last few days about some Sweet Candle that appeared to be going crinkly and stunted. However, I only got to have a closer look last night and noticed they were crawing with aphids so I had to zap them quickly with some liquid Derris. They appear to have picked up a bit overnight but I just hope they haven't passed on any of the various viruses that can cause serious damage. It just shows you have to be vigilant at all times.