Allotment Diary–Thursday 18 August 2016

Continuing my tidying up streak I finished trimming the primary kale and secondary kale/broccoli beds today, having done the primary beds yesterday.  I have two of each because last year I lost most of my winter kale crop of mildew and I’m trying to repeat the same experience.  Unfortunately I noticed a slight blush today, so I’m trying out an organic fungicide, it didn’t work last year, but I’ve caught it earlier this time around. 

This generated a huge amount of trimmings for composting, which I chopped up in the hope of speeding up the decomposition of the stalks.

Working on the allotment I’m definitely becoming more aware of the need to to manage insects and diseases more effectively, as they seem to be a much bigger issue on the allotment where there’s so much cross contamination between plots.  I’m using nets to good effect, but I also have organic insecticide and fungicide in my toolkit.  Weed surprisingly now seem the more manageable challenge.

I didn’t have much time today, but fortunately Debbie picked up the pace and netted the winter cabbage bed:

resized a cloche frame for the early beans/peas:

Put the polythene on the cold frame:

and made some temporary venting blocks as well as generally doing a quick tidy around, watering and picking yet more windfall apples!

I came back in the evening and sprayed the courgettes, cucumbers, peas and all of the kale beds for mildew, the red kale for white fly, the beats for black fly and the asparagus for beetle, quite the palaver.

Finally I planted up three containers on the patio at home with a total of 9 potatoes, they should be ready in three months, around the start of November.