15th August 2021, Blight bites and construction moves on
The first two pictures show a very depressing picture to tomato growers everywhere. This is what tomato (and potato) blight looks like. It is a wind borne fungus that affects this variety of plants and it is highly infectious! Once it arrives, there is precious little you can do except take off unaffected tomatoes and burn the vines / leaves.
In our case, we managed to harvest a bountiful amount of green tomatoes but at this stage very few had turned red. We managed to get some ripe ones in the polytunnel but they were not the most bountiful crop, as explained in a previous post.
The wet rainy July and beginning of August really did the damage. Not particularly cold but wet and windy, ideal conditions for the spread of the disease and on an open allotment, with plenty of people growing tomatoes, within 1 week everyone had it… Maybe next year blight-resistant varieties will be on the cards. Relish and pickles aplenty for xmas presents I think.
With all four pallets now installed for the terrace, time to add the actual retaining wall for the raised beds. The installation requires the soil to be moved out of the way so that Chris can get the power tool behind the screws and as it is quite long, this is quite a bit of work, but finally, as you can see, starting to look quite nice and tidy.
With the wall complete you can see how the finished raised bed looks and no sooner was it complete, the full complement of soil and flowers planted. Still plenty of work to be done, next step is to install the decorative brick (term, loosely used, decorative) and to finish off with the decking boards.
Notice the potatoes all cut back now - the blight got them too - so off to the fire with the foliage! Hopefully the potatoes underground were not affected, and we got the disease contained soon enough.
Now we have a little bit of a race against time. The polytunnel needs to have raised beds built around it to secure it for the winter and we are now fast approaching September. At some point the number of dry days where we can put in a full day's work are going to reduce, the days get much shorter and therefore time available becomes a more scarce commodity. Time for a big push! We don’t want to be picking up the pieces of the polytunnel again next year!!
