Oh dear, blight on the horizon?

So, there we are with our wonderful new plotshare, half of it already in excellent cultivation, and already the serpent has appeared in our little Eden.

I was making the most of Sunday’s sunshine when I looked along the row of potatoes our ‘official’ plotholder had planted with such care, and I saw a single potato - out of line but earthed-up - and with the wrong colour flowers just about emerging, to boot.

So I dragged our lovely plotholder, Duncan, out of his Sunday lie-in to tell me what he thought and we agreed that it's probably a rogue from the previous owner not clearing the bed properly which Duncan had earthed up by mistake. Being a remnant means it may well be harbouring blight, so out it came, I carried it home in a plastic bag and it's going in the bin tonight!

The dirty on potato blight

The first signs are darker or brownish patch and yellowing of the leaves, which may either curl up or turn black, then a white bloom develops on the underside as the foliage dies. The spores produced by the fungal bloom are washed down into the soil resulting in dark spots on the potatoes and reddish-brown stains like rust appearing right through the flesh. Potato blight can survive the winter as mycelium (tiny spores) especially if tubers are left behind in the soil after harvest. The fungus grows on shoots from these tubers the next spring and – in the nastiest possible way -produces asexual spores which are airborne to new crops during warm moist conditions.

Treatment

At the first signs of infection the top growth or haulms, should cut off and destroyed to prevent the spores being washed down to the tubers. All leaf debris should be removed too, and the entire blighted crop should be removed from the site.

Now we just have to wait and see if we got to it in time! Potato blight is the absolute pigging end in my opinion.

Labels: allotment-cultivation, allotment-potato-blight

Allotment year one - pacing yourself

I'm reading a book called The Half Hour Allotment by Lia Leendertz, which is published by the RHS, and while it's full of good ideas, there's one that I feel faintly nervous about them promulgating so widely. It's the suggestion that in the first year, or first few years, you should leave 2/3rds of your new plot fallow while you get on with cultivating the final third.

Hmmm...

Nice idea but ... as Ms Leendertz goes on to point out, this can cause consternation in your neighbours who don't want weed seeds and creeping perennials spreading from your unworked section to their hard-cultivated plot, and can actually break the terms of your rent, because there are quite a few allotment sites that require you to keep more that 33% in cultivation at any one time!

Having said that, it is important with a new plot, whether allotment or vegetable patch in the garden, to pace yourself. You WILL get gluts, even if that seems unimaginable now, and you WON'T have allowed for how much time it takes to harvest, process and store glut vegetables. You WILL find some weed, pest or problem that takes up much more time than you planned - for us it's the perennial weeds, for a neighbour it's a constant battle with a fox that digs up her seedlings (on purpose, she says).

So fallow doesn't have to be fallow. Potatoes, for example, can be planted until June, they break up the soil (so you've got lovely soil to plant in next year) and keep weeds down (because their leaf cover and deep roots don't give perennials a chance to get a good grip), and even if you get only a small harvest from late plantings, it looks like you're keeping the plot in cultivation.

Labels: allotment-cultivation, fallow-allotment, new-allotment