Take me back to dear old Blighty...

Did I mention that the spuds were doing really well?! Well, they were... The first and second earlies were both providing a good crop but I knew that the bad weather was ideal for blight... I kept looking out for it but everything seemed fine before the flood... Lisa even banned me from saying the word...


But as you can see it ravaged the whole crop in no time at all... we just didn't have the time (let alone the weather) to dig them all up... the blight struck like a wave along the potatoes. The outside tomatoes suffered too... really badly... It's even managed to get into the greenhouse to some extent, but i'm trying to control it by removing the leaves and sacrificing some of the weaker plants, just to provide more room for the circulation of air...


This is why... the tomato plants in the greenhouse are laden with fruit... I just hope it ripens off before the blight destroys it all... Yet another dodgy year, as far as the tomato family goes...


But there are some plusses... The courgettes don't seem to mind the wet weather so much, in fact they're doing quite well... same goes for the cucumbers... they're looking really good, unfortunately, i haven't got any photo's because the light's just been too poor to take pictures on my phone... They say August might be better... we'll see...

And Then The Rain Came

So the 25th of June, the day that mother nature tried washing Sheffield and Hull off the map and the day she tried bursting Ulley Res's banks... We're right on the top of a hill so there was no way that we were going to get properly flooded but the volume of water that fell in such a short space of time managed to overwhelm the drainage capacity of out humble allotment... The weather had been pretty grim for a while so there wasn't much tidying or maintainance going on to be fair but the floods put the boot in...


The path was a flowing stream for a while, the brassica bed filled up like a pond and finished off more or less everything apart from the salad stuff and the swedes (i hope)...


No, that's not a paddy field, that's the red onions and shallots, sat in at least an inch of water, they were looking so good too...


...and this is what it looked like the next day... most of the red onions ended up rotting, we pulled them all up, and the shallots, but they weren't really ready and they were pretty small once we'd peeled off what i thing was white rot... ah well... maybe next year, we might have some normal weather.

Things Start Off Well

So, one bed gets a border to see how it works... and it seems to work pretty well, a nice plank balanced over the top allows access for weeding and thinning, as ably demonstrated by Lisa! At this stage in the proceedings (mid May) we were well on top of our game and the weather was making it easy for us... plenty of time to do little (and large) jobs here and there... the hard work was paying off.


The brassies were doing really well, not much slug action... spuds all in at the right time (over 50 plants) and coming on strong... no problemo... or so we thought.


The alpine strawberries also got a nice edging round them (all from the old shed we took down). We gave them a good mulch and started to see much better results than last year.


As always, Bruce was hard at work avioding the sun...