♪ 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.

Watch out for those frosts

At this time of year it can be quite frustrating when you have a greenhouse full of plants and you want to start hardening off and planting out. A couple of weeks ago I'd put several trays of various plants outside with a view to hardening them off in readiness for planting. However, the last 3 nights have seen temperatures in the Midlands plummet so I've been bringing plants back into the greenhouse (things like onions and brassicas) or going even further and bringing more tender veg indoors overnight.....lettuce, pumpkins, french beans, peppers etc. It's a bit of a ball-ache but worth it for the peace of mind.

So you really do have to keep an eye on those overnight weather forecasts. There would be nothing worse than putting in all the effort to get your tomato plants looking like this....

......and waking up to find several pots of green snot in the morning.

Another very tender crop is celery and I have 10 plants of Evening Star in their final pots. A crop that requires plenty of nitrogen I have already given the beds where I intend to grow them a dressing of Vitax Q4 plus ammonium nitrate, in anticipation for planting out at the end of the month. I've never managed to grow good celery before but I've got a few plans in mind and intend to give them more attention this year with a view to showing a few at the end of the show season.

Fertilisers

I'm at risk of becoming Dave Thornton's groupie as I attended another lecture given by him on fertilisers on Monday night. It's a heavy subject but I'd recommend you attend such a talk if you get the chance so that you can better understand your plants needs. Again, I shall be divulging as much as I can about what I learnt over the coming weeks and months but for now it's important you get any fertilizers onto your beds at least 2 weeks before you plant or sow. A good compound fertiliser with equal NPK is as good as anything for now but you may want to consider applying extra nitrogen. Dave felt that we amateur gardeners don't pay enough attention to nitrogen depletion in the soil, as it's the one ingredient that gets leached out of the soil during winter and which is most easily taken up by plants. Plants requiring a lot of nitrogen will need much more than others....things like cabbages, brussels, celery and leeks. A surprising veg that also needs a lot of 'N' is beetroot.

Like I said, more on this subject soon. At the weekend we went away for a short break in Norfolk but whilst I was there I took the opportunity of visiting the garden of Trevor Last in Norwich. If Andrew Jones, Sherie Plumb and John Branham are (in no particular order) the Man Utd, Chelsea and Arsenal of veg showing then Trevor is the very highly respected Everton, always capable of getting a result. He specialises in long carrots, parsnips and celery these days. I was gratified to see that he wasn't that far advanced in his preparation, although his parsnips, growing under enviromesh and polythene covers were about an inch high. When we returned on Monday afternoon the first of my parsnips had pushed through the compost surface. His onions were on a par with mine but his leeks were probably an inch in diameter which is pretty awesome at this time of year.

Steaming!

I need to find some of this and get it on my garden this autumn......and it needs to be well rotted. I haven't put any cow shit on my plot now for a few years and I think it's starting to show. The soil looks tired and lacking in substance.

It's basically clay and whilst I've improved it over the years my intensive growing regime means I expect a lot of my soil. It can get very wet and cold in the spring meaning I can't sow or plant too early and it bakes hard in the summer. Things like cabbages especially have been disappointing this season simply because I think the soil runs out of steam. I plant quite close together and don't believe in watering unless I really have to. You can apply fertilisers to the soil but unless the soil is meaty and full of humus I don't think it does an awful lot of good.

So........

Homemade tomato feeds

This season has been another good one for my tomatoes. I've won 3 out of the 7 shows I've entered, and can't believe how I didn't win 3 more. On each occasion the judge's decision seemed totally baffling and that belief was reinforced by other people saying the same. I came 3rd out of 20 entries at Moorgreen which was perhaps the most satisfying of all the results in that the quality was very high and the show was judged by Gerald Treweek.....one of the now legendary judges from TV's 'The Great British Village Show'.

I put my improved success these last two years down to my feeding regime. I alternate the feeding with 3 different feeds. One is the usual tomato fertilisers you can buy from the garden centres and the other two are homemade 'stews'. I cut down comfrey and nettle leaves and soak them in buckets of water for a few weeks. The liquid is strained off into bottles giving the red comfrey liquid and the green nettle liquid. A capful of each of the 3 feeds in turn is put into each watering can at every watering during the season, AFTER the first fruit on the lowest truss has reached the size of a pea.

The only other feed I might give is a spraying of epsom salts over the foliage if the leaves start to turn a little yellow. This is a possible sign of magnesium deficiency, and spraying epsom salts on the leaves seems to miraculously turn them back to green within a few days.

Because of my feeding programme I've now won 6 shows in a row against our friend Wendy in the Smith v. Hallam tomato challenge after going several years unable to beat her.