The last couple of days have been warm and muggy. We've only had a few limited spells of sunshine but it's felt very hot in any brief sunny spells. Much of the time we've had dark clouds giving the impression that it might tip down at any moment but it's remained dry.
It felt too warm to do anything too energetic on the plot but our brassicas that had been growing on in the cold frame since arriving in the post on 19 August were ready for transplanting into the allotment. The plants are to replace a few weak specimens already planted and to plant up a new bed of autumn and winter cropping brassicas.
In this photo you can see that our cauliflowers (Clapton) are growing well and I'm expecting some decent harvests from them in the coming weeks. However, if you look to the left of these plants you'll see some weak looking specimens of a Romanescu type of cauliflower planted at the same time as the Clapton ones.
On removing the weak looking plants it looked like they were suffering from club root.
The other possible cause might be from cabbage root fly but in that case I would have expected to see little maggots in the plant roots and I didn't. Cauliflower Clapton is considered to be a club root resistant variety and on this showing it certainly lives up to its billing. My only concern is that the replacement brassicas aren't club root resistant varieties either so it will be interesting to see how they perform.
Making it into a double whammy our outdoor tomato plants have succumbed to blight.
It's taken just a few days for them to go from healthy looking plants to this. The tomatoes in the foreground are Crimson Crush and are supposedly more blight resistant. They are certainly not as badly blighted as the other varieties but I'm not holding out much hope for them over the next few days.
If you're interested in checking out the varieties of brassicas that I've planted up you can check out the details here.
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I've had a couple of mysterious brassica failures (sudden collapse). After reading this I'm going to inspect the roots closely on my next visit - I've been chased away by the rain today.
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