Page 51 - Simply Vegetables Spring 2022

Lettuce Little Gem
close to the plants and the maggots, when they hatch, go into the soil and eat the roots. The tell-tale signs are drooping of the foliage tinged with blue. Again, a physical barrier is the best preventative. You can buy discs to place round the base of the plants to keep the flies off, but you can make
your own using carpet underlay or thick polythene.
You can begin to harvest your early potatoes this month if they were planted early enough. I suggest that you dig up just one or two plants to see if the potatoes
are large enough. Even if they are large enough, you don’t need to dig them all up at once just dig up more when you need them. The plants you are not harvesting need earthing up by drawing up soil
round the stems. While on the subject
of potatoes, I must mention blight which starts as brown patches on the leaves. The spores are washed down into the soil and
Sprouts ready for planting
affect the tubers making them unusable. It doesn’t normally arrive till July, but you can start spraying with an approved fungicide as a preventative. Another disease
you could try to prevent by spraying is chocolate spot on broad beans. As the name suggests the disease causes brown spots on the leaves and plant growth is affected.
I mentioned looking out for pests last month and you need to keep doing so now and throughout the season. Aphids attack a wide range of plants and one pest that
I haven’t mentioned before is gooseberry sawfly. A serious attack can defoliate plants very quickly. With these and aphids, if there are only a few you can squash them but if there are a lot, you need to resort to spraying.
If you are growing tomatoes on the cordon system, which means growing
one shoot up a cane, you need to keep
it tied to the cane and remove all side shoots that appear between the stem and the leaves. The greenhouse doors can
now stay open now that the risk of frost is passed. Make sure you keep up with the watering, and also water the benches and floor in hot weather (called damping down) this increases humidity and reduces the temperature.
If you are growing Chrysanths and dahlias, the plants need “stopping”. This means pinching out the top of the plants when about 6 inches (15 cm.) tall. This makes them produce side shoots, called laterals, or breaks, which will eventually produce the flowers. The more of these laterals there are the smaller the flowers will be, so exhibitors reduce the number of laterals to get larger flowers. In the case of Chrysanths, just two or three per plant so you do the same if you want large flowers. If you just want cut flowers for the house, you can leave five or six per plant. See that they are all secured to the cane I just tie some string round the whole plant. Also in the flower garden, see that all tall plants are tied to the canes and keep removing dead and fading flowers, then they will produce more.
If you are growing strawberries, they should be fruiting soon, if not already. Put some straw under the plants to keep the fruit off the soil. Also, it is a good idea to put some nets over them to keep the birds off, or there won’t be any left for you!
Key to suppliers D (Dobies), S (Suttons), M (Marshalls), R (Robinsons), SH (Shelleys), F (Fothergills), B (Browns)
Chrysanth plant stopped and showing breaks
Dahlia bed planted
Floribunda rose Trumpeter
Simply Vegetables 51