Allotments can be difficult

It’s all been bad news this week. First, our baby gooseberry (purchased for 99 pence from one of those quid shops and nursed tenderly by me for two years until it was a thriving plant) went into the ground at the allotment in December. Yesterday Himself came home from a watering session to tell me that all its leaves had disappeared. Given that sawfly has appeared on gardening blogs from Durham to Dorset and back again, my worse fears are playing hell with my natural optimism, and I’m going to have to shoot up to the plot to night to find out.

Second, our neighbours tell us their raspberries have a caterpillar infestation – now that can’t be sawfly, I don’t think, because they like gooseberries and currants but not (as far as I am aware) raspberries, which means that we may be about to have another fruit based invasion to deal with.

Third, I accidentally dug up a tuber from one of our first earlies and it was warty. Warty is not right and fear that we may now find that we have some ghastly soil-based potato-deforming disease to contend with.

I knew I shouldn’t have boasted about my peas – this is what happens if you dare to say anything good about your plot! So instead of showing you anything growing or even a bit green, in case it is the next thing to get blighted, look at how very elegant one of our allotment neighbours is ... I can assure you that nice soap, scrubbing brush and hand-cream by the water tank is not us!

Labels: allotment-caterpillar, allotment-potato, allotment-sawfly