Soilman's Allotment Blog

Something rotten

These few days of torrential rain have been great for the potatoes; it's been very dry, and I feared for them.

  Early flowers

I've even got a flower or two, so the first spuds are almost ready. This is a highlight of the vegetable gardening year.

  Potato virus

Less good is that one plant has a virus. In tomatoes, which come from the same plant family, rolled leaves are a sign of health. In spuds, the opposite. Viruses are usually the cause.

To be safe, I should destroy the plant... which irritates, because certified seed potatoes are supposed to be virus free. That's why you pay through the nose for them.

Hey ho. Heads, they win. Tails, you lose. Anyone else got viruses?

Growing for broke

They say, don't they, that it's a sign of madness to do the same thing repeatedly and expect a different result. Hence my favourite dictum:

"If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got."

I try to live my life by this creed. So the question begs itself: Why the bloody hell am I planting garlic again?

Two years running, rust has all but destroyed my crop. Now I'm seemingly going for the hat-trick.

Nurse: The straitjacket.

Halloween blues

Here's next year's potato bed, cleared and manured. I'll dig it through in November when the soil's cooled a bit and the weeds stop growing.

I'm so paranoid about clubroot that I have a 5-year crop rotation: Potatoes; alliums and pulses; brassicas; roots; sweetcorn and cucurbits. The brassicas always follow the alliums and pulses, because pea and bean roots fix nitrogen in the soil. The root bed is never manured: parsnips and carrots fang on freshly manured ground.

What with the weather, the smell of manure and the shortening days, I'm getting a serious dose of seasonal melancholy. When the clocks go back in a fortnight I'll be totally gutted.

O reader, peccavi

Grown a bit, haven't they? These cauliflowers are coming on a treat. All the rain we've been having is suiting them. That and the chicken shit I've been watering on.

For every ying, however, there's a yang. Check out my onions:

This is downy mildew, which we got last year too. Left to spread, it either kills the plants or renders them useless for storage. Bad news.

It's serious enough to demand serious action. I've done what I loathe doing, which is spraying with something non-organic – in this case, mancozeb.

How I justify it: This is my most important crop. It makes me almost self-sufficient in onions. Better one spray than losing the whole crop and buying shop onions all year. Onions that are sprayed endlessly with everything. And that come mostly from Spain.

How I really feel about it: Shitty and guilty.

The way to rusty death

Here's something you don't want to find on the allotment: Garlic rust. The orange pustules on the stems contain millions of spores that will gradually colonise the whole plant.

I have a problem with rust. It comes every year, although weirdly it never affects leeks... which it should, in theory. It's not a terrible drama, though. Provided I catch it early, one spray of Bordeaux mixture usually keeps it in check. Some people use Dithane, but for me that's a step too far into agri-chemical gardening.

Got the cauliflower seedlings out today. Deeply satisfying. I love growing brassicas. Great to eat and a challenge to grow well.

It will be extra challenging (for which read 'impossible') if the weather forecast is accurate. They say it will hit 40C this summer (gulp). Say what you like about global warming. At least we'll die with a tan.