Tuesday, May 30, 2017

The Highs and The Lows

Actually I'll start with the lows.....

I'd written that the onion bed wasn't looking too healthy and since our last visit more of the crop had taken a turn for the worst. A lot of the garlic in the main crop seemed to have swelled and split as hoped so we decided to pull it all up and see if anything could be salvaged...... the results, not good!

Most were actually very small, looked like they had white rot and we found a lot of the bulbs had small white worms in their base. Inside the larger bulbs were small red insects, in between the papery layers.


Heather did her research and has found out the little red critters are Allium Leaf Miner. It explains all the symptoms we've seen. More information on these little bu**ers can be found here.

https://www.rhs.org.uk/advice/profile?PID=643

The end result was that only 3 out of 30 bulbs were salvageable (modelled here by a camera shy Heather). It wasn't good to see a pile of wrecked bulbs on the ground, especially the bigger ones. We'll remove them not compost them.


We'll be looking at the shallots this coming weekend but I think we know the result already :o(
Possibly the only good things to come from this is that we can dig over that bed and use it for more squashes, and that crop rotation means we should be ok by the time we come to use this bed for alliums next time. This year though the leeks will go elsewhere.

The highs...

There's 'bean', (told you I couldn't stop), some good news on the bean front. We were expecting to be pulling up half our runner beans and replacing them with seeds as the growing tips had died off, but they have decided to grow new tips instead, the leaves look better and things are looking up, good news.

The broads are now black fly free, we've nipped out the tops and the beans are almost at picking size. Add the appearance of our first dwarf beans which were planted directly in the ground only a week ago and its all go in the bean bed. The French climbers are in now too.

A mini harvest this week but it shows summer is coming to the farm and hopefully it's the first of many! I love a fresh lettuce.




Happy Gardening Folks!!

3 comments:

Sue Garrett said...

So allium leaf miners are red are they? I'll be looking out - another crop for enviromesh treatment? Runner beans often go through a shaky spell after planting out.

Mal said...

Crikes you must be upset by this. Hope these don't make it to Scotland. Normally it's just plain white rot from the damp conditions here. Fingers crossed for another year. I already grow carrots under environmesh and would hate to have to do the same for onions.

Dicky said...

We weren't too happy.

They are red at that stage but go through several. We found lots ;O(

Mesh can cause issues if the bugs are already in the ground, they get stuck under there....doh, can't win.

Hopefully next year will be better, never had this before.