♪ Always look on the bright side of life…..plants dying/being eaten/disease etc♫

As you get older you grab hold of life's little ironies that befall others, small beacons of knicker dribbling mirth that cheer you up during the day to day grind of existence and keep you plodding on through life with an extra spring in your step. During a particularly stressful day at work yesterday I received an email from Dave Thornton saying that he had lost several parsnips over the weekend to a rogue snail that was now an ex-snail. It cheered me up no end and I took great delight in ripping the piss out of him during an email tennis exchange. However, after I had dried my pants out I suddenly realised what he had said......PARSNIPS! I've lost carrots to snails before and mentioned the need to apply slug pellets to your drums and raised sand beds but a few days ago in another posting. But I've never had parsnips succumb to the slimy sods before and therefore never applied pellets! So my insides were tied in knots all day until I could get home and double check my own parsnips. I needn't have worried as all was fine. They got a sprinkling of blue slug exploders though and I was able to continue taking the waz out of DT throughout today!


My greenhouse is now bursting with stuff that will either need hardening off, pricking out or planting. But the last few nights my shallots have been causing me some concern. I'd given up hope of them gaining any reasonable weight this season as they didn't seem to have much 'top'. However, the recent rains have really perked them up, the ammonia sulphate top dressings has worked and they appear to have swelled visibly overnight since the photo below was taken and new green growth is sprouting from the growing tip. It just shows there really is no substitute to 'proper' water supplied by the good old British sky!

Today I harvested my first pickling shallot of the season. I learned my lesson from last year however when I was taking them off the clump when they reached 29mm. They actually swelled to about 32mm during ripening rendering them useless for showing as they would not have passed through the judges' 30mm rings. Oh how I laughed at myself over that one!!! So this year I have fashioned a simple cardboard gauge with the prongs set at 27mm apart, and as soon as any bulblet touches the two prongs it'll be out of the ground and on the ripening rack. I'm hoping they'll swell to be spot on 30mm dia. or maybe a gnat's nadger under. If anyone would like one of these handy gauges send £19.99 plus £1.50 p&p to Smithyveg Unpatented Buttf*ckers Inc. and I'll pop one in the post to you.

For many years now I've been fighting a seemingly losing battle against a patch of bindweed that comes up in one of my raised onion beds where I'll be planting some 250g onions in a couple of weeks. But this season I think I'm beating it because I did the one thing that most men find impossible to do. I actually read the instructions on the weedkiller bottle! By adding the exact amount of liquid to the spray bottle and no more, and repeating the process every couple of weeks the plant is definitely dying. In past years I've thundered the weedkiller over the plants at the rates I thought fit, thinking I knew better than any scientist, and although the weeds changed colour overnight they came back with renewed vigour it seemed. A garden speaker at a talk I once attended likened an overdose of weedkiller to binging on drink. Have a skinful and you'll be violently sick in the big white porcelain yodel bowl, feel ill all next day but ultimately you will survive. Take a few drinks every day and it will eventually kill you. Weedkiller is designed to do a similar thing.

This is true in reverse with fertilisers. You wouldn't give a baby a 12oz steak for its dinner but food that is designed for small constitutions. With small plants you don't want to whack the feed in at the beginning but give them small doses of the right fertiliser at the right time to help them grow at a regular pace. That same speaker came up with the way to remember NPK......shoots, roots and fruits! N for nitrogen for leaf production, P for phosphates for root growth and K (this is where it can get confusing) for potassium (it's a Latin thing!) which is for later in the season for the ripening of fruits and getting skin finishes on things like onions etc. Therefore, in the early days your plants need a feed weighted to N and P, more N for things like cabbages, leeks, beetroot and more P for carrots and parsnips. And a good general feed for most veg just after planting out is good old Miracle Gro believe it or not. Dave Thornton once told me that! Snail! Parsnips! Heheheheheheeeeeeeeee! Happy times.