Vicky wrote

Pulled up all the garlic, which appears to have rust, and onions that
shoudln't have been there, which had white rot. Turned it over and
put in a very late last row of broad beans (next to the nearly-ready
row of broad beans on one side and the newly transplanted in strawberry
plants). The plan is, once these are all done and out, to spread the
strawberry patch over to cover it. (All planted through weed blanket
this time - the old strawberry patch is just a huge pile of grass and
weeds atm!)

Weeded the potatoes, which are over-run with giant thistley things.
Nasty to weed, but they do come out nicely once you can get a grip on
them. Unfortunately I did that in the time I was meant to be putting
out the mini sweetcorns. The patch for them is rotorvated but not
weeded, which is annoying. :-(

Nick wanted to put the sweet potatoes out, but he got called out by
the bees, so that never happened.

And after looking at my carrot plot and finding the number germinated
has doubled to 6, I've thrown in loads and loads of out of date carrot,
scorzenera and radish seeds! Probably about 20000 seeds. Some of the
packs were 5 years or more out of date, so I'm not expecting more than
about 1% germination, but even if it's that amount ...

And - 2 cherry tomatoes are showing in the greenhouse.


We have White Rot in our soil so we plant all our alliums 9 inches apart,
the theory being their roots won't touch so if one gets WR then it stays on
that one and does not travel along the row. Seems to work. Next door
allotment has lost all his garlic to WR, ours look Ok so far although rust
is a problem but that normally does not affect the crop. Forget growing
Spring Onions if you have WR.
One tip I heard of and we tried last year for the first time is to mash up
some clean alliums (garlic in our case) into a can of water, or two, and
water over the plot you will use for your onions next season. Do it a couple
of times during the season and the theory is it makes the fungus germinate
thinking there are alliums to infect when there aren't so it dies.
--
Regards. Bob Hobden.
Posted to this Newsgroup from the W of London, UK