I hadn't strimmed my plot since last year when I started digging over the land. Some of the grass was about a metre high creeping over the scaffolding planks, trying to get at my veg. So today I strimmed it and it looks nice.
After strimming I set to work on finding some more cutworms. Yes, I'm slightly addicted. It's quite satisfying rummaging through the soil to look for the pest that eats your seedlings. I remember weeding the carrot rows at Shillingford Organic Farm and collecting slugs along the lettuce rows, so it's definitely what the organic dudes do. I remember asking, "Do I leave the worms?" I've come on a little, if I do say so myself.
These daily updates are really a diary for me and my future vegetable growing so I can look back and see what I was doing in years before. One problem with it though, is that it's very difficult to see any change happening when I'm looking at my stuff every day! Some stuff like my potatoes do seem to be growing very fast - the second earlies are now properly coming through (only one row though which is weird) so I earthed them up a little. Lettuce is doing the usual really, just sitting there sending out a milimetre of growth every day and my tomatoes are pretty much on holiday although a couple of flowers are starting to open. The true carrot leaves are pretty though but it's a shame my first row has so many gaps!
I think out of all the things on my plot, the weeds are growing the best of all.
This afternoon I headed to the farm to have a look for some cutworms. The grandson of one of the workers there helped me look. He's 5. Specifically, we were concerned with the lettuce and cabbage beds.
We found 5! In theory I think I can control them in this way: it's not like they chew on a plant and then hide round the corner in the bushes till night falls - they are usually right next to the plant they've chewed on. Case in point: one of my cabbage plants had a slightly wilted leaf and upon closer inspection I noticed the stem had been nibbled. I put my hand a centimetre below the soil and foraged around in a circular motion and found a cutworm immediately! He was buried about a centimetre below the soil surface, right by the stem he'd been nibbling on!
I was going to take the cutworms to the chickens next door, but they were all having a big party (the owners), so I gave them to the magpie behind the greenhouse instead - he's there to control the magpie population on the farm. (He's in a cage, not sat on a chair with a clipboard.)
These days I'm often just going through the motions down on the farm: check if my tomatoes are still looking weird, pick up chopped lettuce leaves, and have a look to see how very slowly everything seems to be growing in this cool weather. But today with a sultry feel in the air, it felt like the best thing in the world to be doing in the evening:
My potatoes had just caught a frost a couple of days ago, which is a relief because I thought they'd caught "blight, hormone damage, curly leaf virus, and were dying". So that's good.
The lettuces I sowed a couple of weeks ago have came up, but there were quite a few gaps especially in the Bedford row. So I had my back up "gap fillers" in pots and transplanted these in the gaps. And it looks nice to have full rows of lettuce. I'm hoeing like crazy around the whole lettuce bed, picking up cutworms as I see them and lobbing them in the field: I don't think they'll be able to make their way back too soon, if they can survive being in a field full of cows. So I'm back to growing lettuce!
My onions are all starting to push through really well and I'm looking forward to having a full onion barrier around my carrot bed. There's nothing better than an onion barrier, is there?
My sweetcorn came up in 10 days!
Anyway, it's nice when it warms up.
And on the way back I was thinking: growing vegetables is really good. Although I like the idea of eating my own healthy vegetables that haven't been sprayed and are fresh, a lot of my interest comes from being immersed in the outdoor world and nature and learning stuff. A couple of days ago, my potatoes were affected by a frost. Most people wouldn't know there was a frost! I didn't. It was way too warm for a frost, I thought. But on a clear night, the ground loses more radiation than on a cloudy night. Plus, night temperatures are usually taken a few feet above ground, so I need to bear that in mind when checking the forecasts. That's the sort of stuff I like to learn.
As I hoed my lettuce bed, there were all sorts of beetles, worms, and caterpillars in my soil and, as I left the worms and beetles where they were, and lobbed the cutworms as far as I could into the field, I thought to myself: "I'm 36, single, living at home, earning a pittance from gardening jobs and throwing cutworms in fields. Life is good."
I sowed another row of swede today - most had germinated pretty well from a couple of weeks ago. I sowed my second row of carrots at the end of April and not a shoot in sight, so I scrapped that one, dug over the whole bed, and planted another row. I tended to sow really thinly the first time round, but this time I emptied half a pack of seeds down one 12ft row! I'll get a carrot if it kills me. I also sowed another lot of beans, which means I'll have a good succession of beans - I really like french beans, so if they're successful when I plant them out, I may just plant a whole bed of those. No movement on the bean test so far. It'll probably take a couple of weeks or so for anything to show, I reckon, so I'll probably wait to plant out my beans till I know the soil is safe. Something like that anyway.
As beans are quite fast growing, I've decided to do the bean test on all 3 different types of soil I have: organic compost from the garden centre, my top soil mix, and my manure and compost mix which is in all 6 raised beds.
I've potted on 3 of my Dwarf French Beans which all look healthy with lots of set of true leaves.
If, in a few days, the one in the top soil starts twisting like my tomatoes, I'll know it's the top soil. But as it's probably the manure in the top soil, I'm hoping the bean in the manure and compost mix (which is all over all my beds) doesn't start doing the twist as well. If it does, then I'll know it's the manure everybloodywhere, not just in the top soil.
In other vegetable news, my second earlies "Charlottes" are now poking their heads through, a good few weeks behind the firsts, as well as my maincrop. Slowly but surely, they're all coming through. I just hope they're not just being greeted by weedkiller!
This morning my potatoes looked perfect. This afternoon all the leaves are black! Ha! It's like the world is showing me everything that can go wrong when growing vegetables. I'm acquiring quite a list of affected veg:
Lettuce all gone (Cut worm) Earlies all with blackened leaves (Don't know yet) Tomatoes (Still not sure but it's looking like hormone damage)
The good stuff? Er...:
Onion sets beginning to poke their shoots through Cabbages are still there and the leaves are massive Carrots are still there Other stuff in the greenhouse/our house seems to be doing OK
I'm starting to get the feeling that, if something doesn't grow well or just gets attacked to death all the time, rather then trying to kill the pest, just grow something else there that the pest doesn't like. Another pest may well emerge but at least I'll get to know all the pests then. That's what I'm going to do with my lettuce bed - plant loads of beans in there instead. My book doesn't mention cut worms in the bean section and they'll be bigger and stronger by the time I plant them out anyway. So that's a plan. The other option was to use nematode-based insecticides but that option gives me the creeps: I quote, "These products contain...millions of microscopic eelworms".
Seeing as 30 of my top soil potted tomatoes have either blight or hormone damage, I'm determined that my other 24 plants do a little better. So I brought them back home today for a few weeks until it warms up again - I think August is meant to be nice. I love the part where things grow really fast and healthily! In a few weeks I'll probably put them into their final pots, although I'm not quite sure where yet, as I'm loathe to put them anywhere near the others. And definitely not in the same soil.
As for other stuff: cabbages sown directly have germinated, a few swedes have come up, almost all of my first early potatoes are looking excellent and have already emerged from the massive eathing up I did a week back, carrots are starting to get their first true leaves, lettuce are rubbish and I'm now down to only 3 out of the 15 or so I transplanted, and onion sets haven't emerged. Inside the greenhouse, all the tomatoes' new growth is twisted and fern-like so I'm just waiting to see if they'll recover - they are starting to flower though, cucumbers and courgettes are looking nice, and the last of my cabbages sown indoors are all out - I have about 20 coming along and that's the end of my cabbages.
As for the lettuce, I was told by someone at work that if you turn uncultivated land into a vegetable patch, it can take a couple of years for the pest population to die down. So it's no wonder all my lettuce are getting chopped at the stem...
I sowed onion seeds a few weeks ago and they germinated well and were on the their way to looking less like grass and more like something resembling an onion shoot. But it's a shortened season as it is and everyone else seems to be planting sets, so out with 2 rows of seeds and in with Hercules Onion sets!
I left in one small row of seeds to see if they do in fact make it, but the bulk of my carrots are now surrounded by onion sets.
I've decided to take the netting off from my lettuce bed. Maybe I need some songbirds to eat the bugs in there otherwise I'm going to have nothing left. The cut worm seems more voracious than anything else at the moment. Maybe.*
I was going to put out my beans but it's windy as hell and a bit cold, so I won't be doing that just yet.
*I'm going to add "maybe" to everything vegetable related now because it's an ambiguous learning curve.
