Look at the tips on that!

A week or so ago I started to notice that the tips on some of my shallot leaves were turning white and that the bulbs on those affected seemed quite soft. A couple got so bad that I had to chuck them. I mentioned this to 'He-who-thinks-he-knows-everything-about-veg-growing' aka. Dave Thornton at the weekend and he said it was white tip disease (Phytophthora porri).

To quote Google:

"This is another fungal infection which usually appears from late summer through the winter. Symptoms are a white die back of the leaf tips, white patches appearing on other parts of the leaf and stem, and stunted growth. Infected leaves look watery, thin and papery, eventually they rot away."

White tip can also affects leeks and onions so i've acquired a suitable fungicide that I'm told will stop the disease in its tracks and allow the plants to eventually recover. It smells like wazz. I've put all the affected shallots together and away from the healthy ones to stop the spread. The bad ones have been sprayed and do appear to have recovered in the last couple of days somewhat, so hopefully they will still make reasonable plants eventually.

Tonight I went to listen to Mark Roberts talk on growing his veg for the collection class. He looks at me as if I'm mental whenever I say it but Mark is my hero as he's just a normal fella who works full time but still managed to win the collection of 6 at the 2007 National after only 3 years of trying. His celery in that collection scored 18.5 points out of 20 and were the best I have ever seen. He's had a difficult few years but is now hopefully going to be back with a bang at the National in Llangollen, so Peter Clark, John Branham and Trevor Last need to be worried. He's invited me to see his very impressive set-up in June so I'm looking forward to that. And Yorkshire batty boys Unsworth and Bastow.....he's going to be entering the set of six single veg class at Harrogate so that's us tossers even further down the pecking order!

The sun has got his twat on....

My neighbours know Spring has sprung when they see the same strange ritual at the bottom of my garden. It was a beautiful sunny day in the Midlands today so it was perfect weather to start boring and filling the holes in my parsnip drums.

First thing first though, I had to prepare my mix. This meant bringing my sieving machine out of its long winter hibernation. A few repairs had to be made to the box, basically a four side wooden affair with a metal perforated bottom. By filling it with compost and rocking it back and forth over the outer wooden frame by way of the old pram wheels, the compost falls through the 6mm holes in the metal base leaving all the hard lumps and bits of twig and other crap that the manufacturers bulk the compost up with behind. You can't see in the photo but a plastic sheet is stapled to the bottom of the outer frame. A hole in the centre of that allows the fine compost to fall into the large green collecting box. This set up really saves on back strain and I can zip through a 75L bag of compost in 20 minutes

I modified my mix slightly this season by adding more nutrients than usual, because the drums are higher by about 8 inches:

15 litres sieved multipurpose compost (with added wetting agent)

4 litres medium grade vermiculite

3 litres silver sand (play sand)

3 litres sieved sterilised topsoil

3 oz superphosphate

3 oz sulphate of potash

3 oz Tev-04

3 oz calcified seaweed

6 oz garden lime

The reason for the extra lime was that I was told canker doesn't like lime so as well as other precautions I'll be taking to stop the spores landing, if they do they'll hopefully find the mix not to their liking. Make sure everything is well mixed. I do everything by hand but ideally you want to buy a cement mixer for the job and leave it running for several minutes. If mixing by hand, a good little tip is to mix all the lightweight ingredients and nutrients before adding the sand and soil. In this way you should get more even distribution of the nutrients. Next step is to core out the holes using a length of 3 inch diameter plastic piping. The drums are first given a good drenching and then left for 20 minutes to allow the water to sink into the top few inches. This stops the sand collapsing at the top if it's too dry when you start boring. In the past i've actually got 7 holes to each drum but I've reduced it this season to try and get bigger and better roots. I do it all by eye, and the sand that is extracted is simply emptied into my nearby (and for now, empty) stump carrot bed.

Next step is to bore out the cored holes with a stout metal crowbar. Mine is about 5' long. I go from hole to hole, turning the bar in circular motion until I end up with a conical hole. By forcing the bar down after each turn you can gradually increase the depth so that the bar is only just above the top of the hole.

























The final and most pleasing task is to put the mix into the bore hole. I have a metal funnel that makes this a very quick operation. Don't ask me why but I always start with the middle hole then the ones at the back. When the mix is near the top I compact it down with my hand then top up with more mix. After all the holes are filled, I'll water the top of the drum and then put a small indentation in the centre of each hole with my finger. The drum is then covered with a pane of glass to keep cats off. The mix above only did 6 and a bit holes this season because of the extra depth, whereas last year I was getting 10 and a bit. I've filled 3 drums of 5 so far and will get up early tomorrow to do another couple before I go to TEGS.


























All I need to do then is to chit some seeds indoors on some wet tissue paper and carefully place the seeds in the indentations with the root radicle pointing downwards. I'll start some seeds off towards the end of next week.


The variety i'm growing this year is Polar because it appeared to resist canker last season for me far better than Pinnacle.

http://www.theediblegardenshow.co.uk/

I went to help set up the NVS stand at Stoneleigh Park near Coventry tonight. I didn't get chance to have a look round but from what I could see there'll be lots for the dedicated Grow Your Own-er to get to grips with in the main hall. For the next few days I'll be trying to entice new members into the NVS fold but if any of you are at the event and you see me please come over and say hello to me.

http://www.theediblegardenshow.co.uk/

All hail, Medwyn!

Great news show folk! I had a missed call this morning from a number I didn't recognise. When I listened to the voicemail it was none other than Medwyn asking me to give him a call. My first reaction was to wonder who's been moaning about me now, but when I phoned back it was to do with my lack of success at getting Vento to germinate. He said that i'm not the only one who's been having problems with it. The hard coating the seed is supplied in is for farmers who need their seed to mass-germinate in the field at a time when soil conditions are correct for them and the coating holds them back until the time is right, but as a result it's no good for the show grower who needs to get an early start indoors. I know a few haven't had any problems with their Vento, and I did manage to get a dozen germinated after I'd broken the seed casing with a hammer, so like most things it's a case of learning how to grow things for the best. However, from next season he's insisting from his suppliers that none of his onion seed is to be supplied with the seed casing so that's good news for incompetents like me! It's nice to know there are suppliers out there who listen to their customers unlike some I can mention!

I had a nice little chat with him and he's only doing big displays at Tatton Park and Malvern this season. He's having a break from Chelsea but may return in 2013, because in the meantime he's writing a book about his life. I wonder if there'll be a chapter on me? He's never beaten me you know!

Gulp!

I've had an andvance copy of the schedule for the National Championships in Wales and it's bought home to me how much work I have to do between now and then. In previous years when the schedule has arrived (with the NVS Quarterly magazine) I've had a quick look and filed it away in the hope that one day I might compete. But now I'm booked in at the hotel there's no backing out although i'm not getting carried away. The National is placed down to 5th in each class and believe me if I get a single 5th placed ticket the trip will be deemed worthwhile......although of course I expect to win peas!

One of the classes I hope to enter at Llangollen is for 3 cucumbers. On a local level i'm very rarely beaten with cu's but at NVS level it's a whole different ball-game. I'm going to be growing them a different way this season, and it will involve constructing a pair of wooden 'A'-frames at the far end of the greenhouse with a plank across to be able to grow the plants in growbags on the plank. The plants' leading shoots will be trained along horizontal wires the length of the greenhouse so that the fruits hang down away from the coarse foliage and hopefully won't get marked. In the past I've grown them up canes for 4 or 5 feet before training them horizontally, but you very often get good cu's after 2 or 3 feet which come into contact with the tangle of foliage. I've had to protect them with sheets of polystyrene and even had to cut out valuable leaf material to stop the fruits getting scratched. By growing them on the plank so high up they will barely reach a couple of foot before they are being grown horizontally. This is the way Charles Maisey grows his cucumbers and he's been National Champion several times so if it's good enough for him I shall be giving it a try. I like this method because it means the border space the cucumbers would normally be taking up can now be used to grow something else so I'm thinking along the lines of french beans, lettuce and globe beet. It's a few years since I've grown anything in growbags so I'll need to be on top of the watering regime.

Thinking way, way ahead of myself I've also constructed a box should I be lucky enough to have a set of fruit good enough to exhibit. The dividers will be covered over with cloth and allow me to tranport them securely on long journeys with them rolling about. Cu's are more difficult to grow than people think, with the timing to get 3 identical fruit one of the main issues. I've known them gain an inch a day in length once they start to form. Allegedly, a top National grower set his alarm clock for 18 minutes past three in the morning as he estimated that would be when a fruit he needed for a set of three would have put on the extra 3mm he needed !

Roll up, roll up!

This weekend I shall be helping to man the NVS stand at the Edible Garden Show at Stoneleigh Park. If anyone is at a loose end this weekend this event may be of interest.

http://www.theediblegardenshow.co.uk/

I'm told there'll be plenty of things to see and do and more importantly buy! I shall be at the NVS stand (turn right upon entering the hall....we're the 8th stand along, stand 15) on the Friday but i'm not sure what times i'm on duty as yet. However, If i'm not there you'll probably find me stalking Rachel de Thame somewhere. Assuming she doesn't get a restraining order i'll be there on Sunday too.

A bit of fun

I was really hoping to get my parsnip holes bored today but an urgent household DIY job has set me back a weekend. I'm not too worried as the seed chitting method buys me a bit of time but I will have to make sure I get it done next weekend.


So I've done a few other things with the few hours I managed to grab in the garden. I've pricked out a few trays of cabbage (Brigadier), red cabbage (Rodeo) and brussel (Abacus). At the far end the onion sets 'Setton' all have small green shoots.




















Also in the greenhouse the shallots are growing strongly but a few are looking a a bit poorly at the leaf tips. A quick squeeze of the main bulb tells me that they are going rotten so I reckon I'll be left with about 25. Still if they all split into 4 it will give me 100 to select my sest from.

Although not time to be planting your spuds outside yet you do need to make sure all is well with them. Mine are set out in trays under a towel to exclude light for now. The shoots are only a few millimetres long and a quick inspection told me all was well and none have rotted off. These ones are Kestrel.

With a view to a local show that is held early in July, and which I entered for the first time last season, I have set away some Casablanca potatoes in buckets. This set up allows me to keep the buckets indoors for now, and once growing away they can be put into the greenhouse during the night. During the day they can be put outside but bought back in at night if frost is forecast. When thefoliage is so big that I cannot easily move the plants all risk of frost should be gone, but I will have to support the foliage.Last season I tied some string around it and secured it to next door's wire fence. Watering was easy and I harvested some clean, if weird shaped potatoes, and managed to win the class with 3 Kestrel. This year I'm just doing these 4 buckets each with a single Casablanca seed that I reduced to a couple of shoots on each. I chose Casablanca as it's an early variety but also because I can't wait to grow it and couldn't wait until an August harvest to find out how it grows.

This diagram shows how I did it.

Also with a view to this early show I set up this framework in the greenhouse to grow some long carrots. The pipes still had some compost in them from last season where i'd tried to grow some long beet outside. The beet hadn't really come to anything, making puny roots that suffered from leaf miners,so I figured the compost still had some of the nutrients in it. I emptied each one out inividually, added about 4 litres of sand from my old stump bed, 4 ounces of superphosphates, 2oz of lime, and 2oz of potash, mixed it all together and refilled each pipe having screwed them to the frame to keep them upright. 4 seeds were sown 1/2" deep in each pipe, dead in the centre. If all goes well they'll grow through the mix and into the greenhouse border soil.

Within a couple of hours i'd filled 8 tubes and got the seed sown. It's 17 weeks to the July show so i'm not sure if these will be of a size i'd want to show but if not I'll leave them for a show in mid-August. If nothing else it will help me learn something about growing carrots in pipes indoors and perhaps give me something to think about for when emptying and refilling several tonnes of sand in drums becomes too much of a chore. Hopefully a few years away yet although I'm no spring chicken anymore!

And I hope you all like the new outfit we bought Oscar yesterday. He wore it whilst we watched the reds stuff Arsenal in the Cup together. I'm very proud.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!!!!!

Why is that everyone seems to be out to f*** you over at every given opportunity? Thanks very much inland revenue for the £3k overdue tax bill because you've been giving me the wrong tax code for the last few years despite my employer giving you the relevant information in the correct timescale.

And despite ordering Tasco onion seeds what gives Exhibition Seeds the right to take my money but then substitute it for a different variety without asking me. If I'd wanted 'Frisco' I'd have f***ing ordered f***ing Frisco you f***ing robbing f***wits!

Coring v. boring!

In answer to a comment against the previous post I need to explain the difference. Apologies to Dave and I was aware I perhaps didn't explain this properly.

Coring is taking out a plug of sand with a 3" dia drainpipe to the depth you need. Some growers take the whole plug of sand out by plunging the drainpipe down 3 or 4 times until you reach the bottom. Very often they will finish off by 'boring' this hole out slightly bigger at the top to 4 or 5" dia.

Boring is done by simply plunging your stout 6' long crowbar to the bottom of the sand and boring your hole by turning the crowbar round and round so you end up with an inverted conical hole. You don't actually take any sand away but compress it away from the hole.

Coring probably allows you to get more holes in a drum but boring means you can probably only get 5 maximum as once you have bored one hole you can distort this when you come to bore the next one. Personally, I would recommend boring all your holes before you start filling as you can go along them again and just open them out and make sure they haven't gone out of shape. This takes some doing and you have to be careful. The sand needs to be just the right consistency to do this, with the right amount of moisture to stop it all collapsing. I shall illustrate what I mean in April when I do my carrots.

However, this weekend is parsnip hole time, and contrary to what I've just said I shall still be coring first, then boring. As i've never had a problem with fanging roots on parsnips I shall continure with this method. Parsnips seem far more robust and when they germinate they just want to send that tap root down as quickly as possible.

Carrot mix decisions

Had a cracking day out in Cumbria once again on Tuesday, doing a 10 mile fell walk in the afternoon and then attending Ian Stocks' talk on long carrots in the evening at Westmoreland DA. Ian's talk gave me quite a bit of food for thought as his mix is quite a bit different to any others i've seen or used myself before. For the record it is:

75 litres sieved Levington F1 (you're lucky if you end up with 60 litres after sieving all the sticks, tampons and other shite out)

25 Litres silver sand

12 ounces Vitax Q4 (or Tev 04)

12 ounces Calcified seaweed.

Note that he uses no vermiculite whatsoever. However, as he said if you have a mix that works for you then don't try and fix what aint broke, although by all means try a drum with a new mix for experimentaion purposes if you have the room. With this in mind I am going to use Dave Thornton's mix for the coming season as I had already decided to use this having seen his stunning carrots at Malvern (don't tell the big-headed twat I said that) but I am going to go back to boring the holes rather than coring the first few feet then boring. It is only in the last two years that i've cored and i've had terrible problems with fanging. Ian reckons that by boring you are creating extra pressure around the root and forcing it downwards. It's an interesting concept but it's a fact that when I used to bore I regularly produced carrots like these.....

But since i've been coring i've produced donkey fodder like this......Nuff said!

Dave Thornton's long carrot mix is:

4 buckets sieved multipurpose compost
1 bucket superfine vermiculite
1/2 bucket washed sand (I will use silver sand)
"a handful" of calcium carbonate of lime
"a handful" of Vitax Q4
"a handful" of seaweed meal (I will used calcified seaweed)
Plus a few pinches of phorate insecticide.

In the meantime the first 8 Cedrico tomato seedlings, timed to grow my Llangollen entries, have been pricked out. It seems an awful way off just now to be thinking of trying to get an even matched set of 12 plus 4 for the Millenium collection class from these tiny little plants but that's the plan.

Cedrico go go

Another top day out tomorrow. A 5am start will see me motoring up the M6 for a day's walking in the Lake District and hopefully I'll have some sunshine to enable me to have decent views for once! I find it best to travel up that early in order to get past the stench of Liverpool as all the unwashed scallies skulk back to their beds as day breaks after a night of thieving. In the evening I shall be attending Ian Stocks' talk at Westmoreland DA on long carrots and after a few shite years with long carrots (something I'm sure he'll remind me of!) I hope to pick up a few tips to make 2011 a better one.

My Cedrico tomatoes have all germinated so these will be potted on in the next few days into cell trays for now. We still have night-time temperatures just above freezing so these will stay indoors for a long while yet.

Whilst I was stocking up on calcified seaweed and superphosphates at the garden centre yesterday I bought a packet of beefsteak tomato seed. I don't ordinarily bother with beefsteak tommies but the schedule for the North of England Horticultural Society Championships popped through my door last week which is run in conjunction with the NVS Northern Branch Championships held at Harrogate in September. A class which caught my eye calls for 3 dishes of tomatoes, 3 beefsteak, 5 medium (e.g. Cedrico) and 6 small fruited. With first prize money being 40 quid I thought it might be worth entering hence the need to acquire the beefsteak type, although I'll only grow two plants of it at most.

18

18 is a significant number. For instance it's the record number of English football titles won by a team, currently shared by Manchester United and Liverpool, although Manchester United will overtake their pikey rivals at the end of this season, assuming of course that Steven 'utter scouse cheat' Gerrard doesn't do his usual trick and create a goal for Arsenal with a dubious pass-back like he did last season for Chelsea. No, i'm talking of course about 18 pointer vegetables which include stump carrots, cucumbers, tomatoes, exhibition shallots and runner beans.

For show-growers making up collections they can be very useful if you have a shortage of 20 pointer veg, and indeed Peter Clark has often won the National by using quality cucumbers in his collection of 6. When well grown, getting 13 or 14 out of 18 points can often be a better option than getting 11 or 12 out of 20. One 18 pointer that isn't often seen on the show benches is the humble aubergine, in fact it's about as rare as seeing a Liverpool player who doesn't want to break a Man Utd player's legs. I've tried growing this veg for a few years now and haven't had much success, so I know it's well worth its valuation as an 18 pointer veg. At Westminster there is a class for veg over 14 points and less than 20, and Dave Thornton has won this a few times now with a set of three quality aubergines. The variety he grows is 'Bonica' and i've decided to try it by sowing a few seeds today in the hope of giving Dave a run for his money at Westminster in October, and maybe get a few nice specimens like these.

Text books say they can be grown in a similar way as tomatoes and given the same feeds. They like a moisture retentive soil that also doesn't get too waterlogged, and irregular watering can lead to blossom end rot much as it does with toms. I read a few years ago that they are best grown in large pots in the greenhouse and can be planted on a mound in the centre of the pot so that the base of the plant doesn't get too wet and rot. By planting on a mound when you water it runs away from the foot of the plant and thus you are able to give plenty of water safely. I've found that red spider might can be a problem so a regular mist of the leaves is needed and very often the fruits form but drop off before they get much bigger than a cherry tomato. Last year the leaves of my plants turned yellow quite early on in the season and although a regular spray of epsom salts helped a bit I think perhaps I needed a bit more 'oomph' in the potting mix they were planted into. I shall be using a more soil based one this season.

The thing about 'showing' is to learn from your previous mistakes and improve things bit by bit for the next season. It's much like life isn't it? For instance, if you left your car within 10 miles of Liverpool you would come back to find it on fire and all your possessions stolen by the thieving scouse bastards, so the next day you'd know not to do it again.

Success at last!

My third sowing of Vento is popping through the compost surface. This was after two previous no-shows, the difference being that this time I broke the little green balls encasing the seed very carefully with a hammer believe it or not. I couldn't actually see any seed once I'd done this so I just threw all the broken bits into a pot and hoped for the best.

I'd already ordered an emergency packet of Tasco from Exhibition Seeds as back-up so one or two of you will realise from that statement just how desperate I had become!

Ssssh....

Well less than a week since I sowed them and my Cedrico tomato seeds have germinated, along with some cabbages and brussels. I was going to give brassicas a miss this year as they were a bit of a failure again last season. Despite being netted over the cabbage whites still got in and managed to ejaculate their satanic spawn over the plants. This season I have got hold of some Decis insecticide which is a systemic so hopefully the caterpillars won't materialise but i'll also put netting over the plants to stop the butterflies. Last season I experimented with growing the cabbages in large bottomless pots set above the ground in the hope that it would aid air circulation underneath the plants and deter slugs which always seem to decimate the lower leaves that invariably come into contact with the soil surface. All appeared to be going well until mid-July when we went on holiday and other crops were demanding my full attention. The heavy heads also made the pots tilt because the roots obviously hadn't penetrated through the pots into the soil below and so all in all it was a bit of a waste of time and i'm back at square one, although I do think the idea had some merit. I shall try planting direct into the soil this season but through some sort of membrane that keeps the leaves off the soil.

On Tuesday i'm hoping to get up to Cumbria again for a day's walking in the Lake District followed by another talk on long carrots at Westmoreland DA given by Scottish carrot growing legend (his own words) Ian Stocks. Bearing in mind his reign as National pea champion will come to an end at Llangollen he's relying on doing well with his carrots this year so I will be all ears and with notebook in hand. This weekend I shall be finishing the filling of the sand in my long carrot drums so they have time to settle before the mid-April sowing dates. After that I shall turn my attention to setting up a few drums for a crack at some long beet. After taking advice from a scottish grower Paul McLeod these will be filled with a sand and compost mix rather than pure sand. As I was left with a dumpy bag full of compost from my spud bags that I could not re-use for spuds because they were all scabbed up last season, I wll used this compost in my long beet drums. You still have to bore holes and fill it with mix (more on this at the time) but because long beet must be given lots more water you need a growing medium that is a lot less free draining.

In the meantime, NVS legend and National Championship judge John Trim has been giving a masterclass on how he would judge the pea class at Llangollen in August. He should certainly be able to select my winning set with his eyes closed!

Further to......

....my post below about an NVS class at Harrogate for 6 single specimens of veg I had confirmation from Dave Thornton today that this class is scored for points. I had asked him the question to make sure that when I enter along with Northern spazzers Paul Bastow and Dan Unsworth that we could have our own little competition to ascertain a 1-2-3. I did say to him that of course none of us would actually win the class or anything but he came back with the totally unnecessary retort that we wouldn't have a f******* earthly of getting in the tickets! Sounds like a challenge does that boys!?!

Anyways......if anyone else cares to joins us I suggest ten quid side bet, winner takes all for most points awarded. Any takers?