5 pitiful little carrots full of holes! It seems that the fleece provided all the other pests with a nice place to live and from the irregular growth it seems water doesn't seem to go through fleece as well as I expected.So far this year the carrots have been the most troublesome crop, first refusing the germinate and then growing very weakly. Still at least with this lot I avoided the carrot root fly...
On the plus side there was more sweetcorn, tomatoes, courgettes (phew!) and raspberries to pick and also the first of many globe artichokes
Later...All 3 artichokes have now been eaten, simply trimmed, boiled, and accompanied by a lemon and herb butter. Yum.
6 comments:
I try to confuse the carrot fly with Tagetes and their smell and I think it's working. I had very fine carrots this year but I also hoed them a couple of times.
Great looking artichokes, I'll be growing them next year for the first time.
I did OK last year and seem to be doing well this year with carrots - always start them off under a fleece but once they're about 3inches high I take the fleece away. Also planting next to onions is said to help keep pests away.
Last year I grew Early Nantes and this year have been growing Autumn King (Improved) - both have produced fairly large specimens!
I find that when i cover things like carrots they do worse. The biggest culprit are the slugs that live under the collars which are meant to protect the base of the cabbages!
It's true that Environmesh seems to encourage slugs in the same measure that it deters carrot fly. So the crop gets scoffed either way.
Gardening is such sweet sorrow.
I've never had any success with carrots outside. It just seems impossible to avoid carrot fly on our allotment and the soil is too heavy for them. We get a little crop from a raised bed that we've built in the greenhouse though and home grown carrots taste so good. Your artichokes looks great though - I'm hoping for my first crop next year and am looking forward to it as they're one of my very favourite veg.
Hi, I am growing on an allotment in Ireland.Much the same problems everywhere! We had blight very early on, tomatoes are in the greenhouse so they are OK, but main crop potatoes did get it,I cut back the stalks and left the pops in the ground but dug some recently and they are very small. We have had a great crop of carrots for the second year running by growing them in barrels.
Peggy
Post a Comment