New 🥔 Potatoes Blight.

 It's potato blight weather this week in the Emerald Isle.

My cheap Homeguard seed potatoes from the discount supermarket do not appear to be blight resistant.  Next year I will grow the Hungarian Sarpo Mira blight resistant seed potatoes again.

Being organic gardeners we don't use chemicals.  This is what we did on inspection of the blighted haulms before and after:

Yellowy turning black foliage.  I wore a pair of gloves and cut off the foliage with a pair of garden secateurs and piled it in a heap and covered it with grass and weeds.

Foliage removed.

I will leave the seed potatoes in the ground for a fortnight before lifting them.  Hopefully when Scorchio returns next week any blight spores will be killed off with the heat.

On hindsight I deeply miss my polytunnel and starting the seed potatoes off in the polytunnel in February early March.

We're digging and eating early  potatoes for our tea every night.  Even Diesel and the other four legged pals love our new potatoes 🥔 😋. 

Have your potatoes got blight?  How do you deal with in a organic none chemical way?

 

Aston Martin Plant?🤔

 The other day some one asked me if I knew what was eating the leaves on their mother's Aston Martin plant.

I nearly answered:

" James Bond perhaps?"

I didn't of course.  I asked if they had a photo of the said plant on their mobile phone?

They showed me a photo of a beautiful Azalea in flower and it's leaves with holes in them.

I consulted Professor Google like I do for most things and sure enough it came up with Azalea Leaf 🐛 🐛.  

One should spray them with Neem oil.  I suppose physically removing any flickers would also help?

Whopper Winter Onions Grown In Repurposed Baths.

They're crackers.

Regular readers will know I plant Japanese or winter 🌰  🌰 sets every September and they are ready to harvest in June.

I planted some of them in baths complete with drainage holes.  The repurposed baths were filled with fym, topsoil and home-made compost.

I think a combination of the wonderful sunny weather in May and now the frequent showers and a good sprinkle of pelleted chicken manure.  Have all helped to  give us such a bountiful harvest.

You will see in the above picture that the weeds are getting plentiful.  I must get my gardener back.  He's very inexpensive and a couple of cans of lager or Newky Brown always suffice for wages.

So take heart would be allotment gardeners on allotment waiting lists.  

Start collecting old plastic baths and heating oil tanks and grow veg in your back garden or garden.  You could even grow them on concrete.  

The repurposed raised beds/baths may not be aesthetically pleasing on the eye.  But you will be growing your very homegrown organic vegetables.

 

Pigs And Potatoes 🥔 🥔.

A Boar and A Sow going for a saunter along a boreen down to graze in a field.

I took out my mobile phone to take a new photo of my newly extended veg plot.

It was formerly a lawn with shrubs and perennials planted around it's perimeter.

We had a digger in doing some work and number one son duly cut up the lawn.

Instead of putting it back to grass.  I decided to extend my vegetable plot and planted ordinary every day vegetables like new potatoes, onions, red cabbage and leeks.

No longer do I need to listen to the not very pleasant dulcet tones of my petrol lawnmower.

I have course lots of weeds to take care of but at least we will eat well.

Anyone else done their own Dig For Victory job on the lawn?

I might put it back to grass one day but then again it's great to have more veg growing space.

 

My Plant Pot Runneth Over.

 

A big plant pot full of Homeguard new potatoes and a big Japanese 🌰 winter onion.

This mixed weather of 🌧 rain and sunshine 🌞 seems to just be the ticket for the flowers 💐 and vegetables at the moment.

I seem to be just growing basic everyday vegetables this year.

It's good to go out to the veg plot and dig and pick your homegrown and chemical free vegetables.

The taste and freshness of freshly picked vegetables is exquisite and you can't buy that freshness in the supermarkets. 

I would imagine you could buy freshly picked vegetables at a farmers market.  

What are you harvesting at the moment?

A Kansas Song For Our Times.

 Regular blog readers will know that I am a big fan of American Prog Rock band Kansas.

I have often mentioned that I finally got to see them in Warsaw in 2014.

Some of the band are new members and Ronnie Platt replaced Steve Walsh on vocals.

In 2019 they released the following track.  I think it's very apt for our times.  I especially think of the plight of refugees in and escaping countries like Ukraine and Palestine:

"Pack up Your Rubber Duck. I Wish You Luck".

 I was watching Top Of The Pops from 1977 on the television the other night.

The following song came on our television 📺 screen.  Some how it seems to have passed me by:

The lyrics are great and I found it really unusual but catchy.

"So Long" by ABBA was a song I once featured on here that had also  passed me by.

Is there any famous songs you some how missed when you were growing up?