MY WEEK : 40 ( 16TH OCTOBER )

Hello all another week flies by, it only seems a short while ago that we were starting to plant things and I was erecting the Runner Bean supports, the season has flown by. The weather has remained remarkably mild for the time of year here in the Midlands and I think for the majority of the UK. I have noticed this week on the various allotment forums that alot of people are experiencing problems with Whitefly, they seem to be around in vast numbers this year and with the milder weather continuing we will only experience more and more of these pests causing damage to our Brassicas and other plants, I have found out that they will only be killed off by temperatures of -15c which we have not experienced in this part of the country for a few years now.
Despite the very wet weather we have had this week I have still been able to get some jobs done on my plots this week, although for the moment the soil is too wet for me to continue with clearing the ground in my new tunnel so I will have to leave this for the time being and get other jobs done.



This week I have taken the Runner Bean plants down and added them to the compost heap, whilst they are still green they will rot down ok however if I had left them until they were brown and dry they would have taken much longer to . The experiment of painting the bottom 9" of the wooden laths which I used to support the crop with bitumen has definitely worked with only 2 out of the 80 laths being damaged by the damp soil. I have left the haulms in the ground as they have nodules on their roots that will fix nitrogen back into the soil, in the Spring I will just dig these in ready to start again with next years crop.

I have also finished off preparing my Strawberry plants for next season by removing the old brown leaves and any debris that had accumulated during the growing season, I then added some Growmore fertiliser around them to give them a little feed before the onset of Winter. One of my fellow plotholders has generously given me some extra plants that were surplus to his requirements and these hopefuly will fill in some of the gaps that I have in my bed.

This week I have continued to harvest the Calabrese , the smaller spears have suprisingly kept on forming and the yield has been excellent. The other Brassicas are looking really healthy with a greatly reduced number of Whitefly visible after the use of the Organic Insecticidal Soap spray, the Brussels Sprouts are forming however because I either left it a bit late to tie them to stakes to prevent wind rock on the roots or I did not give them enough water during the heatwave quite a few of the Buttons are not tightly closed as they should be, there will still be enough though for Christmas which is primarily why I grow them.

Another job that I did this week was to lift the remainder of my maincrop Potatoes so that I could store them and also to allow me to get the ground ready for next season. I lifted the Potatoes and placed them on a section of my weed fabric to dry for a few hours and then proceeded to sort through them as you should only store the ones that are in perfect condition. I sorted them into 3 catergories, the ones that were too small which will be thrown away, the ones that have signs of either slug or eeelworm damage which will be used up first of all and finally the ones that are in perfect order which will be stored in hessian sacks in a cool frost free and dry place such as a shed/garage or outhouse which ever you may have.



I must say a big thankyou to all of you that have ordered some of my Spencer Sweet Pea seeds during the last week, I hope that you received them all ok and that they will provide you with a beautiful display as they do for me. Following some more enquiries I am looking at supplying other seeds from My Allotments and will keep you posted as to what and when they will be available.

Another development in the last week has been the news from the company that host my Allotments Calendar (Trumba) that as from January instead of the service being free of charge they want me to pay up to $99 a month for the service!! which is incredible, I will of course not be doing this and I am currently looking for a suitable replacement so in the mean time I will not be adding anymore information to it, I hope you understand and will be patient whilst I do this, thankyou Steve. If anyone does know of a good webcalendar that they would recommend, then can you please let me know either by the Guestbook or Email.

Finally for this week, I must say a big thankyou to all of my website visitors over the last 34 weeks, as you can see from my Web Counter I have received 20,000 hits on my website which is absolutely amazing and far in excess of my wildest predictions, I'm glad that you enjoy what I do and what I share with you all, it has made a big difference in my confidence and feeling of selfworth which will encourage me to try to do more, thankyou very much and I will speak to you all again next week, bye for now, Steve.