Back at the wheel!

Yup....I'm back. Tanned, rested and raring to go! However, one thing is for sure. As long as I remain partial to a foreign holiday in July or August I'll never be a top showman. The really top growers would never leave their plots at such a critical time. My daughter has done a stirling job.....well, at least considering her previous attempts.....but I have come back to quite a few problems none of which she could have done much about. If I had been here I could have done something about things sooner.

My runner and french beans are severly infested with blackfly and will need to be sprayed over the next few days to bring things back in line. My Vento onions succumbed to thrips and stopped growing a while ago by the look of things. I may get a set or two but I'll be lucky if I do. Most of my long beet have been infested by leaf miner and appear to have stopped growing.

However, t'is not all doom and gloom. My Sweet Candle stump carrots are going mad and the foliage is positively bursting out of the enviromesh frames. I couldn't resist a scrape at the top of one and was nearly creaming myself at the size of the shoulder. I just need to keep an eye out now and make sure they don't push themselves upwards out of the sand which can cause the shoulder to go green.

My cabbages are still very healthy and the green netting has stopped any cabbage whites getting in. Growing off the ground in the large bottomless pots appears to have helped also, giving good air circulation.

And checking back in my diary I realised it was 12 weeks since I set my Winston potatoes away, which is plenty of time for that particular variety. The foliage was yellowing off and flopping about all over the place. I had a bit of a furtle in the compost in one of the bags and felt a few good tubers, so tonight I cut back the foliage from all the plants. Under no circumstances should you empty out the bags at this point. The skins will be far too soft and any handling will render them useless for showing. No matter how tempted you are you have to leave the bags for at least a week to let the skins harden. Tomorrow I will bring all the bags into my garage and forget about them for a couple of weeks. Then I will empty them out one by one and sort them into sets, putting them back into pots of dry compost fully labelled. I will wash them a day or two before the show. My other varieties need a few more weeks and the foliage is still nice and lush with no sign of blight

More on the plot later when I can hopefully include a few photos.....seeing as our youngest daughter conspired to leave our camera on the plane on the flight out to Rhodes I may be a few days before I can fire up the old camera which is more of a chore to download from. Anyone waiting to see holiday snaps of my semi naked body is going to have to make do with a few grainy shots from our mobile phones......unless of course you beg me not to publish them!