I've just realised it's been over a month since I last posted anything here. To be honest, after the flood, I was pretty disheartened. Going down to the plot and assessing the damage was bad enough, I didn't feel like writing about it.
But things are looking up, we've started harvesting quite a few things and I feel a bit more optimistic about the whole thing. Just keeping my fingers crossed it doesn't start raining heavily again!
Just for the record, the extend of the damage...
- The 3 sisters bed (where we grow sweetcorn, french climbing beans and squashes) dried out the quickest. The growth was slow to start again but nothing died.
- In the legumes bed, the broad beans were ok, but the roots of all the peas rotted down, the leaves turned yellow and the harvest was nowhere near as good as it had promised to be from the abundance of flowers we had at the beginning of June. The first sowing of borlotti beans did struggle for a while but has now put on new green leaves and its first flowers. The second sowing rotted in the ground as well as all the french beans. I have sowed again and the seedlings are showing now. It will make for a late harvest I suppose!
- The potatoes bed remained waterlogged for weeks and the roots rotted down too. All the early cropping potatoes which were at the bottom end got hit the worst, all the leaves turned yellow and they all died (Arran Pilot, Duke of York and Maris Peer). We have now lifted them all and got very mediocre yields of sometimes very small new potatoes. They taste fab though!
The maincrop were in a pretty bad way for a while but they are now putting on new leaves so I'm hoping all is not lost there!
- And it turned out that I picked the worst year for my experiments on outdoors tomatoes!
Well, that's enough feeling sorry for myself! Things are not that bad and I'll post an update later on progress on the rest of the plot and harvest. But for now, it's a lovely sunny day and I'd better spend it outside!
