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Thursday, October 22, 2009

Celery rust



T'is a good job I'm not proud and only show my good stuff on this blog. I have many, many failures each season and by far the most pathetic of all my veg this season has been my celery. I only grow 5 plants in order to get a set of 2 for Sturton and did manage to get a 2nd (out of 2....the pair on the right!), but the quality was hopeless. Celery is a bog plant in the wild so it can take as much water as you can throw at it, and needs to be grown in good quality moisture retentive soil with added manure.



All was reasonably well until late August when once again they succumbed to celery rust disease. Within weeks the foliage was devastated and I had to take off the worst affected leaflets to make them reasonably ok to consider showing them. Asking around on the NVS forum I'm told Dithane 945 will combat this but you need to spray BEFORE you have the problem. Of course if the foliage suffers then the size suffers as a result so I didn't have very large specimens either. I've grown Red Star for the past 5 years (it's a Man Utd thing!) but I think I'll have a change next season and try Morning Star which seems to be the favoured variety on the NVS benches.

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