Rock the kasbah!

This will be my last post for a couple of weeks or so as we're off on holiday at the end of this week to Morocco, to a 5-star hotel in the Atlas Mountains to celebrate 25 years of Leesa putting up with me. Current Foreign Office advice for Moroccan travel lists a very small risk of westener adduction but I figure they're more likely to want to to nab Leesa, so unless I get detained by an amourous raghead camel-shagger I'll be seeing you in September. I'm leaving the plot in the capable hands of my mother-in-law having realised to my cost that leaving watering duties to any of my 3 daughters is akin to asking Fred & Rose West to babysit for you and expecting to come back and find your children looking healthy and anywhere other than supporting a newly poured floor slab.


With each passing day I feel more and more content with my celery, by far the best I have ever grown and that's as much as you can really hope for, continuing to improve. The photo below really doesn't do them justice and with over 5 weeks to Malvern I'm hopeful of getting a set of 3 on the tables. However, I don't doubt that all the best celery growers will have had an exceptional year with this moisture loving crop so I'll only be making up the numbers but it will satisfy me merely to have an entry on the same playing field.

I've now started to let a few marrows form on the plants that I've trained along a metal framework. You can now see how they will hang downwards as they gain weight, fully exposed to daylight and therefore they will be green all the way around. Make sure they are regularly tied to a stout framework like mine as the last thing you want is the ties snapping and whole plant suddenly collapsing to the floor and spoiling your chances.

I'm now starting to get very confident of my tomatoes giving me plenty of good sized fruits for the later shows. From the 3rd truss upwards I have plenty of large round green fruits and it will be these that I hope to have timed ready for Harrogate and Malvern.

The bottom couple of trusses are virtually all red so I will pick these and disperse them to family and friends. A lot of the fruits are quite small but a few (like the one in the photo below) are pretty good quality and if I had a show tomorrow I would take some beating. I'm currently feeding alternately with Chempak no. 8 and soot water.

I've got 2 beds of Sweet Candle stump carrot and the one that is enclosed by polythene with just a mesh top could give me some excellent roots if the foliage is anything to go by. It really is bursting out of the top and forcing the enviromesh upwards so that any carrot fly could get in easily if they so wished, although phorate granules will soon stop them in their tracks. I have another stump bed that is all enviromesh and they are way behind this bed. During all that cold wet weather in May, June and July this frame really did give them a cosstted environment that they seem to have fourished in.

Similarly my long carrots have also benefitted from a similar structure.

Not all is going according to plan however. My brassicas have been an absolute disaster this season, and are as pathetic as Julian Assange and his supporters. They are clean enough (unlike Assange the dirty raping bastard) but they are very small and weak looking plants. I think the beds I grow all my veg on in rotation are perhaps getting a little tired and having spoken to Gareth Cameron i'm going to be giving the soil a drench with compost tea, something he's had some good results with on his pot leeks and which I'll be looking at in more detail and reporting on at a future date.

Until September folks................



وداعا



.....which apparently is Arabic for goodbye! Just looks like some fucking squiggles to me. Mustapha dance!