Bloody Blight is Back!

Spent the afternoon and evening on the allotment. After last week finding everything growing really well, including the potatoes in flower, we arrived to find the potato flowers gone and lots of black patches on the unhappy looking leaves. Yes, definitely blight again. Several other plotholders have already cut off their potato plants hoping to prevent blight spreading to the tubers. We did the same, but also decided to dig up some spuds to take home. As they weren't fully developed yet, we didn't get a huge crop, and the tubers were small. 2 rows of Edzel Blue and a row of Charlotte gave us a small bucketful, though they did look quite nice.


The other good thing from this, it meant we had a big raised bed clear and ready for planting. So the long-overdue sweetcorn, 8 more cos lettuces and a butternut squash plant went in, leaving half a bed free for brassicas, if we want.

Elsewhere on the plot we cleared the weeds on the fruit bed, and picked as much fruit as we could. Some big juicy green gooseberries, loads of blackcurrants, a few whitecurrants, red gooseberries and redcurrants. We pulled up lots of raspberry suckers too, which were trying to take over the whole area.


Runner beans, climbing beans and (especially) pumpkins are all still growing at a surprising rate. We extended the 'cottage garden' bed by about a metre along one side, and put a few more pumpkins in (mammouth, red etapes, winter festival, sunshine) with a couple of arch frames pushed in, to train the winter festival and sunshine squashes over. We removed the mangetout peas (which had produced 4 pods in total) and their supports, and replaced with another arch frame to train one of the enormous pumpkin plants over.