Sunday, 30 August 2009

Spud Issues

It's not all plain sailing in Matt's Patch. The other week I was out inspecting things and had a look at the potatoes that were growing at the end of the garden. This is what I found - all the foliage was just about dead!
dead foliage
Dead foliage - is this blight?

I've no idea what had caused it so I did a bit of digging (no pun intended) on the internet after hearing horror stories about blight.

Still not a lot wiser I read one article about blight that said you should cut off all the vegetation and burn it if possible. Then not dig the potatoes for a couple of weeks so that the blight that falls on the earth dies before the potatoes come up. So as a precaution I cut it all down and got rid.

When we returned from our week camping in Cornwall, Megan and I went to dig up the spuds - if there were any! Actually we got quite a lot:
potato harvest
Desiree and King Edwards

Ideally they'd have been left to grow for longer so that the King Edwards got bigger but that was not an option in this case.

Upon closer inspection some of the individual potatoes had lesions on them. Not all of them, and not all over the ones that did have them.
potato disease
What is this?


potato disease
Some of the potatoes had scabs on them

I now think that this is scab, probably Common Scab but if anyone knows for sure then please let me know and what I could have done to prevent or treat it.

All in all, not too bad for my first experiment with growing potatoes!

Friday, 28 August 2009

Too busy to blog

Blimey - it's the end of August and I have not written a word this month on Matt's Patch! That's not acceptable at all!

Well, we've all been a bit busy, with visiting family in Pembrokeshire, camping in Cornwall amongst other things.

While we were were away last week, we asked our neighbour Chris to look after the greenhouse and water the toms and cucs. It's a lot of responsibility looking after the Patch!

This is what we came back to - lots of gorgeous red tomatoes!
red tomatoes
Lovely red tomatoes

Plus a couple of large cucumbers and a good few raspberries too! Chris should look after things a bit more often!