Thursday 22 August 2013

Potatoes and Tomatoes the Good and the Bad

Tuesday and Wednesday weren't bad days with temperatures into the low twenties. Both days were mostly cloudy but we didn't get any rain. It’s pretty dry on the plot and some rain would be very welcome. We might just get some Friday night or early Saturday if the forecast is correct.

As it wasn't too bad on Wednesday afternoon I decided to lift another row of potatoes.

Next in line or should that be row to be lifted were Nadine. We've grown this variety many times and it doesn’t let us down. It’s a second early variety with a waxy texture and produces a good all rounder for the kitchen. As I suspected there wasn't much damage to any of the tubers. Most of the damage was as a result of being speared by my fork. Just a few potatoes had slug or wireworm damage.
As you can see there were 5 damaged by wireworm and 8 by me. The harvest weighed in at 12.68kg with the damaged tubers weighing 1.127 kg around 9% of the total. These potatoes normally store well into next spring stored in boxes in the garage.

We've also started using a few of our Discovery apples. These are not at the peak of ripeness just yet but are tastier than the supermarket specimens.
In our home greenhouse the tale of woe continues as more tomatoes continue to get blossom end rot. I've never known a year like this with nearly all our tomatoes having this problem.
More were consigned to the brown waste bin on Wednesday as we still await an edible ripe tomato from our home greenhouse.

Copyright: Original post from A Gardener's Weather Diary http://ossettweather.blogspot.co.uk/ author M Garrett

4 comments:

  1. That's such a shame about the tomatoes in your home greenhouse. It's a good job you've got others to fall back on. I have to say that the tomatoes I've grown outdoors have fared much better this year than those in the greenhouse. I think it might be down to the compost. I used multi purpose, whatever I'd got at the time, for the greenhouse plants, but the outdoor ones were grown in upturned growbags. I'll definitely use them again next year.

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    Replies
    1. Unusually this year no blight on potatoes or tomatoes either on the plot or at home. All our tomato plants look healthy enough. It's just the toms they're producing.

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  2. Those apples look fantastic. A real shame about the tomatoes, they are tricky things I think - if it's not one thing it's another.

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    Replies
    1. We inherited the apple trees when we took on the plot many years ago now. It's our best guess that they're Discovery but we usually get a decent crop with minimum effort. That's my sort of crop.

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