Tag Archives: pests and diseases

Splitting the difference

01 Saturday Oct 2016

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Bother. My tomatoes have gone and split on me.

This, of course, is my own silly fault. Tomatoes split for just one reason: the water content of the fruit has been allowed to fall, then all of a sudden someone has come along and guiltily overcompensated with the hose, so flooding the fruits with water. Result: the skins have to expand so rapidly to accommodate all that extra moisture that they can’t cope, and they split. It’s not the end of the world – you can still eat them, though you have to be quick about it before the mould sets in. But it is very annoying.

Splitting (along with blossom end rot, caused by a similar set of circumstances) is a daily risk you run outdoors: you have no control over rainfall of course (I wish) so a sudden downpour after a drought produces exactly the right conditions to split all your fruit. In a greenhouse under cover, where these were grown, there’s simply no excuse. Except bone idleness on the part of a hose-shy gardener, of course.

Some tomato varieties are resistant to splitting: ‘Maskotka’, ‘Terenzo’ and ‘Orkado’ are just three of those which take longer to give way than others, so they’re very well worth trying outdoors given our current yo-yoing weather conditions.

But generally I find tomatoes resistant to splitting have thick, chewy skins – partly no doubt what helps them put up with inconsistent water levels without cracking. And I do like a tomato with a thin skin.

The ones in the pic are ‘Suttons Everyday’, a 1930s heirloom cultivar I was given to try out along with a lot of other heirloom tomatoes. It’s a fine tomato: medium sized, good flavour, great all-rounder as the name would suggest: and with lovely thin skins, which need careful handling if they’re to stay intact.

The current plan is to install automatic watering next year: I have my eye on the Irrigatia solar-powered pump, which works out of a water butt and sensibly powers its battery only when the sun is out and you need the extra water. Inspired. I shall report back, so watch this space.

October garden: Greenhouses and fruit garden

23 Wednesday Oct 2013

Posted by in garden design, greenhouse, landscaping, my garden

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octgarden_greenhousecukes

It’s amazing what you can fit into an 8×6 greenhouse: here be melons, cucumbers, chilli ‘Razzmatazz’, okra, sweet peppers and my amazing tree chilli, now taller than me

The slow dying of the greenhouses is the swansong of my year. They’re the last to go: long after the veg beds outside are brown with dead foliage and slimy with rot, the cucumbers are still challenging me to find new recipes and the chilli peppers are suffusing with colour from green to orange to red.

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Smaller but perfectly formed: ‘Sweet Crunch’ cucumbers, still going strong

It’s been a good year: and a bad. I have two greenhouses, facing each other in the lee of a hedge across the coldframe I made for my old garden (it’s falling to pieces now – a combination of age and a blackthorn tree just above which keeps dropping branches at inconvenient moments).

In one greenhouse I plant cucumbers, melons, peppers and anything else I fancy growing that year: in the other are my tomatoes.

I always start the year so optimistically with my toms: I love to try new varieties or revisit old ones. This year it’s been Gardeners’ Delight, Costoluto Fiorentino (quite the best beefsteak for flavour bar, perhaps, Brandywine) and the plum tomatoes Rio Grande.

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Not so successful. The other greenhouse has been sick with blight for months: nothing will grow in there but the marigolds. Pretty as they are, you can’t eat them.

But despite the dry weather, despite the perfect growing conditions of this blissfully warm summer, the blight got in.

I mulched with compost from the bins outside: mistake no. 1, as it no doubt carried blight spores. Then a pane of glass in the roof lost a corner, so the rain – laden, too, with spores – could spatter the Costolutos with fatally infected water. And the bush tomatoes I had in the corner – ‘The Amateur’ – turned out to be the most blight-prone tomatoes I’ve ever grown, finishing off my other plants by incubating and then spreading the plague.

octgarden_greenhouseaubergine

This was meant to be a ‘Black Beauty’ aubergine: but it’s turned out more like a ‘Pinstripe’. Duff seeds – veg which haven’t grown into what they said on the packet – have been a bit of a feature this year.

Well: it’s a lesson learned. This winter’s to-do list includes changing the soil in this greenhouse; replacing the broken panes; and fumigating with a sulphur candle. Then next year I shall use nothing but the cleanest compost and water with tap water. I’m considering growing only blight-resistant varieties, too: ‘Losetto’, ‘Ferline’ and ‘Fantasio’, perhaps.

octgarden_fruitgarden

My fruit garden: the only ‘finished’ bit of the garden (and even then it needs a netting cage, quite a few more plants and a bit of extra path put in). My little still small place of calm.

On the plus side, my fruit garden is looking wonderful. I planted it just last winter with two maiden cherries, a redcurrant, a couple of blackcurrants raised from cuttings taken from plants I had on my allotment, and a slew of raspberries. Oh, and a bed of strawberries, of course.

You’re not supposed to grow fruit on chalk, and my soil is grey with the stuff. But as a gardener to the core, I’m going to try anyway. So far I’m encouraged: the raspberries have not turned yellow as I expected them to (though three canes have turned up their toes for reasons unknown); the cherries are thriving; and the blackcurrants have had their first fruits already.

Here’s how it looked in 2010:

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Garden words: The January Review

02 Monday Jan 2012

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Amy Stewart

There are some books that just make you go ‘Well. I never knew that.’ And then there are books which make you say it over and over again, to the point where you start bringing up random facts in conversation with friends and family, just to get them out of your head, and when those facts happen to be about small and often fearsome things with a lot of legs your friends and family quickly start looking at you a teensy bit oddly.

Did you know, for example, that British diplomat Charles Stoddart was condemned to spend four years being eaten alive by blood-sucking assassin bugs while held captive in an Uzbek bug pit in the mid-19thcentury?

Or that there is a caterpillar in south America so venomous that if you happen to tread on them barefoot you suffer massive internal bleeding and organ failure? Or that the crew who sailed to America with Christopher Columbus were driven so mad by the chigoe flea, which buries itself under a toenail and lives out its life there, that they cut off their own toes to get rid of it?

Nope, nor me.

You will have guessed by now that ‘Wicked Bugs’ isn’t, strictly speaking, a gardening book, but since we gardeners spend such a lot of our time either encouraging in ‘good’ bugs (ladybirds, lacewings, hoverflies) or murdering ‘bad’ ones (aphids, caterpillars, whitefly, slugs: the list goes on… and on…) then a book about them can only be endlessly fascinating.

There is a section on garden pests which is… well… almost as interesting as the ones about sailors and armies (did you know some used to throw clay pots full of scorpions at advancing Roman troops, circa 200AD, by the way?) though it does suffer a little from a sudden outbreak of advice-giving. I did think the bit about aphids was horrifying though: apparently one female aphid is born already containing within her the beginnings of a ‘daughter’ who is herself already pregnant with a third generation. Wow. That explains a lot.

Others, though, like the terrifyingly efficient Colorado potato beetle, are given a section all their own, so dreadful are they. The Germans thought the US Army was waging biological warfare by dropping Colorado beetles on their heads from planes during the Second World War, you know.

And so Amy Stewart gambols on through tales and titbits so surprising, arresting and downright gut-churning that I have been glued to this book ever since I started on page one. I love her obvious delight in her subject and her ability to tell a good yarn; she has a talent for winkling out little snippets of unfeasibly extraordinary information and using it to grab you by the ears. I just wish I knew how she finds out this stuff.

Little niggles: this is an unremittingly American book, to which you have to adjust yourself and stop chuntering about early on. Sometimes that’s a good thing: I’ve always loved the American ability to find an original turn of phrase (no clichés here).

But there’s a general assumption that the reader’s attention is wandering off all the time (surely impossible given the content of almost every page), so we’ve got silly little ‘pull-quote’ things repeating choice bits of a paragraph in a larger type, presumably to titivate the reader but which end up interrupting the flow. I trained myself to ignore them.

Otherwise, though, the book is a gorgeous little thing: I loved its styling as a battered field notebook, and the line drawings and etchings by Briony Morrow-Cribbs are simply exquisite and a master touch.

Amy already has a more plant-oriented book out, ‘Wicked Plants’, all about poisonous plants, and it’s now on my must-have list. Incidentally. you can read a bit more about the book in Amy’s own words on the BBC Gardening blog.

Not the colorado beetle

27 Monday Jun 2011

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My poor new potatoes are suffering a nasty attack of early blight. Not quite as nasty as late blight, as the tubers don’t seem to get particularly badly hit, though the top growth is looking decidedly anaemic, not to say acne-ridden.

But that’s not what was worrying me this morning. As I bent to the fork to hoick the next lot of ‘Foremost’ into the colander I spotted this pair clamped to a leaf.

‘Oh, my goodness,’ I thought (or less printable words to that effect). ‘I’ve got colorado beetle!’

This is one of the alien invaders that everyone’s very, very nervous about. They skeletonise potato plants (and tomatoes, and aubergines): if you think blight is bad, it is as a minor sniffle compared to the colorado beetle.

The pest is established in France already: it can only be a matter of time before it skips the Channel. It’s certainly notifiable.

Now, normally the internet has just one function in these circumstances: convincing you that the headache you’ve suffered from all day is not a hangover but a terminal brain tumour. For once, though, it served to calm an over-heated imagination and demonstrate that actually, what you’ve got is rather less alarming than what you thought you’d got.

So on my way to the Defra website to send a panicky email to the appropriate authorities I discovered that this is what a real colorado beetle larva looks like.

(Released under commons licence)
As you can see, nothing like my little fellas. However the question remains unsolved: they are ugly little blighters and keep reminding me of ticks with the way they’re squat and tenacious and hold on with all their feet at the front. Here’s another pic.

So – any ideas? What have I got here? And should I – as I suspect I should – be doing something about them? Answers on a postcard (or failing that, in the comments section) please…

Bzzzzzzz

16 Monday Aug 2010

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Look what we found on our kitchen wall the other day.


Apologies for the quality of the picture, but if you’ve ever tried to take a photo of a fairly small insect while balancing on one foot on the kitchen sink you’ll find fuzzy photos are hard to avoid.

This is a hornet, Vespa crabro, our largest social wasp. This is quite a little one, as it happens, though it’s about twice the size of a regular wasp. And just look at that pointed nose: straight out of Bug’s Life, don’t you think?

I think we must have a hornet’s nest not far away as we found a proper grown-up one of these buzzing extremely loudly and angrily against our skylights not so long ago as well. That one was seriously enormous: a good couple of inches from nose to tail.

Everyone I have mentioned this to has immediately gone into a ‘don’t panic!!’ routine quite worthy of Lance Corporal Jack Jones. In fact, though, I think hornets suffer from a bad press. They are accused of everything from stinging people viciously with no provocation to ripping off the heads of poor innocent little bumblebees. Unfortunately for them, this is a recurring case of mistaken identity, with a good dollop of ignorance thrown in. This is a particular shame as they’re actually quite rare, and what’s more they eat loads of nasty garden pests – including aphids and caterpillars.

In fact, hornets will only sting when quite severely provoked: on the whole they are quite docile creatures. You’re far more likely to be stung by a conventional wasp (which is a spiteful little creature much less deserving of sympathy).

And as for the ripping the heads off bees thing: that’s not this hornet. That’s the Asian hornet, Vespa velutina: and now that’s an insect to strike fear into your very heart. Fortunately you’re unlikely to see one in the very near future, as although they’ve made it to the south of France (where they are ripping the heads off honeybees even as I write, no doubt) they haven’t – quite – made it here yet.

However, it is probably only a matter of time: the flood of insects arriving on our shores, largely hiding in imported plants arriving in our garden centres and therefore our gardens, is reaching plague proportions (step forward, citrus longhorn beetle, oak processionary moth, harlequin ladybird and the now ubiquitous lily beetle). They reckon we’ve got about 10 years before the Asian hornet arrives: when we, and no doubt their relatively harmless European cousins, should be afraid. Very afraid.

Plant of the month: August

10 Tuesday Aug 2010

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Lilium ‘Original Love’


At the risk of sounding a little, well, unfeminine…… Phwoooooaarrr.

We’ve been watching this one unfurl for the last two weeks like a slow-motion porn film. First the long, fat green buds began to pout and swell. Then they gradually darkened and a deep wine-red stain crept up like a blush. Finally, a few days ago, the first one burst: one petal, then another, then they all peeled back to reveal the most voluptuous, sultry, seductive flower you can possibly imagine. It is almost embarrassing in its suggestiveness: impossible to miss, impossible to ignore, quite possible to fall in love with.

It’s an L.A. Hybrid: I’d always thought that meant they were bred by some fanatical britches-wearing and probably bespectacled American lily-grower in Los Angeles, but in fact it turns out the L stands for longiflorum and the A stands for Asiaticum. Much more proper and with a certain RHS correctness about it. That’ll teach you to get all romantical then.

That gives you a tall (mine’s about 4ft), sturdy, hardy lily that’s pretty much trouble-free: heck, if I can grow it, anyone can. This one hasn’t even suffered the usual attack of the lily beetle. I’ve had to harden my heart against these pretty red bugs so that I could squash them: I had less trouble with their larvae which have the attractive habit of covering themselves in their own excrement as they sit munching your lilies.

At the moment I’m betting that my LA hybrid’s escape has been less to do with their in-built lily beetle resistance and more to do with the fact that I didn’t get around to planting them until late May – by which time the beetles had done their worst to my earlier hardy lilies. I didn’t realise lily beetles had only one generation but it appears to be so, and I’ve murdered the one in my garden. So there.

But anyway. This otherwise ravishing plant does have one downside: in all that hybridising and fiddling about they forgot to leave the scent in (mind you, try telling that to the bees bumbling drunkenly about in its abundant nectar). I have to say, if you’re going to do boudoir, you do need it to be at least a little bit perfumed. However, it’s imperfections that make you perfect, isn’t that what they say? And for such a luscious, seductive, and downright sexy colour I will forgive anything.

Mystery blobs

04 Wednesday Aug 2010

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Any idea what this is?


Found all over some small silver birch trees, while we were rambling about the countryside with assorted small children recently.

They come in clusters, too:


My first thought was, ah – it’s a gall. The leaves are of course obviously somewhat chewed. But when you pick them off they’re rock hard – and they have hollow innards. And besides, birch gall looks like this, which is not at all the same thing.

I was a little sad to find that it wasn’t the rather wonderfully named silk button spangle galls: they look like this:


(the pic is from the compellingly interesting Tree Blog which is following the lives of about 25 trees from seed up, and has an alarmingly comprehensive selection of disease-related pictures to show for it. It actually made me wonder how any tree actually makes it to maturity.)

So – any ideas? I’m still with the galls idea, but am intrigued to know what might have caused this and how. They’re very pretty, but clearly not doing the tree any good at all.

Over to you?

Oy! Gerroff me geraniums!

12 Tuesday Jan 2010

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Would you just look at this?


This has been going on for a month now, and at first I put it down to a bit of frost damage – this is Geranium maderense, after all, I’m trying to coax it through the worst winter since I were a nipper, and despite the best efforts of my little fan heater it’s still a bit parky in the greenhouse.

But then I arrive for a quick check round this morning and….


Now, I think to myself, if it weren’t January and a foot deep in snow outside and minus 7 at night and generally BLOODY COLD I’d think that was caterpillar damage.

Nah…..

Oh yes it is. A closer inspection revealed a small but nonetheless inescapably green caterpillar munching away at my geraniums. Not just this one but also the overwintering pelargoniums which are losing their leaves not through the usual culprits of downy mildew plus a touch of the chills, but blimmin’ cabbage white caterpillars. In winter! In a seriously cold, frosty winter!

With a yelp of horror and outrage I’m afraid I chucked the culprit out of the door into the snow in a fit of vindictiveness and it was pounced upon by the chicken so I don’t have photographic proof, and you’ll just have to take my word for it. A good hunt through has not revealed another one…. yet. But my dander is now up (whatever is a dander, do you think?) and I shall be inspecting with an eagle eye every morning from now on. I also crushed a couple of sleepy aphids and a blackfly while on patrol, so clearly letting your guard down on pest control isn’t on the cards even in this weather. Is there no rest, I ask you?

Incidentally in case you’re wondering what cabbage whites are doing eating geraniums: if they can’t find cabbages then pelargoniums and geraniums are fair game for all the brassica caterpillars as I discovered a couple of years ago when a big brown caterpillar eating a client’s pelargoniums was a cabbage moth caterpillar. So pelargoniums taste like cabbages. Apparently.

And here’s a bit of advice: don’t grow calabrese in your greenhouse. Even if you’ve grown too many seedlings, can’t bear to throw them away and it’s the only place you’ve got left. Especially in a record-breaking caterpillar year.

Harrumph.

A tale of gardening failure

10 Tuesday Nov 2009

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My poor apple trees.

I was raking up the leaves they’ve so generously been scattering all over my chicken run, and to relieve the monotony (and the ache in my shoulders) decided to have a closer look at them – something I don’t do nearly often enough.

I found them etched with a sorry tale of years of callous neglect from their excuse for a gardener. I’m afraid that since they are in the chicken run, they’re something of an afterthought at the end of the garden and I don’t pay them anything like as much attention as I should: the constant and tender cares of better orchard-owners than I are sadly lacking here, and though they try to soldier on as best they can, they’re clearly showing signs of strain.

It doesn’t help that the person who planted them – not me, I hasten to add – put them far too close together: I have four standard apple trees, two Bramleys, two Cox’s, about 10ft apart in a square. That’s about half the room they should have, so they’re at a disadvantage before you even factor in the slacker gardener who’s supposed to be looking after them.

Here, like a doom-laden encyclopaedia entry of afflictions for apple trees, is what I discovered:

1. Woolly aphid

Like cotton wool balls sticking to the bark. There are little critters under there, sucking away joyously at the sap of my apple tree. I’ve seen this covering an entire tree in someone else’s garden, so it can get to epidemic proportions: luckily I’ve only got the odd fluffball or two.

Treatment: I’ll be getting out the hose with the spray set to ‘jet’ this spring: you just zap the suckers away and keep doing it till they’re gone. Very satisfying.

2. Brown rot

Actually I did know I had this problem – I just haven’t done anything about it. The apples go disgustingly brown and pustulent while still on the tree, and then – key to identification, this – they stay there, mummified. If you leave them, they’ll infect healthy apples next year.

Treatment: do the exact opposite of me and pick them off as soon as you see them. Get rid of them in the bin, or burn them: don’t put them on the compost heap.

3. Squirrel damage


This suspiciously regular area of bark damage is characteristic of a visit from one of those furry-tailed rats we’re all supposed to find so sweet. As you can see, it’s eaten away the bark right around the branch, cutting off the water and food and killing the branch. Still think they’re cute?

Treatment: Letting rip with air rifles is, for some inexplicable reason, frowned upon in our semi-suburban street. The dog is, uncharacteristically, some help here: though the main purpose of wildlife in his opinion is to provide him with merry chasing opportunities, he does share our opinion of squirrels and they’re the one and only thing on which he occasionally sates his inner wolf. However, he’s also a bit thick so they outwit him all too easily and laugh their squirrelly laugh at him from on high. I think this is one bit of damage I’m just going to have to put up with.

4. Canker?

I really hope I’m wrong here, but it’s not looking good. Apologies for the lousy picture, but I was in a state of shock when I was taking it.

Canker is the one thing apple growers fear to see. Sunken patches of bark like this, where the branch above the patch has died back (as was the case here) is a sign of a fungal disease that can kill the entire tree if you let it spread.

Now, before panic sets in, I’m not entirely sure this is canker. It’s a bit long and thin – cankers on apple trees tend to be rounder, like the horrific picture on the RHS advisory service page on the subject (now there’s a sight to strike fear into an apple tree’s heart). On the other hand, there’s no denying that there has been considerable die-back above the area.

Treatment: I can feel an extensive programme of winter pruning coming on. The organic way of dealing with canker is simply to cut it out: and if this is canker, it’s very much at the early stages, with only small branches affected and nothing on the trunks or major branches – so I’ve still got a chance to get rid of it if I act now. I’ll be cutting back at least a foot or so behind the canker into healthy wood, and again – I’ll be burning the wood, not leaving it lying around to re-infect healthy areas. And even if it isn’t canker, I’ll have given my languishing apple trees the first TLC they’ve had in oooh….. this many years.

And then I shall assuage my guilt by pampering them in an over-compensating sort of way all year. Before lapsing next winter some time into my usual state of distracted forgetfulness, of course.

I think I shall go and become an accountant now. Goodbye.

Early autumn

03 Friday Oct 2008

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You’d be forgiven for thinking this was an example of lovely autumn colour. It’s a horse chestnut tree not far from my front door.

Unfortunately, this rather fine example of a field maple (I think) right opposite will tell you it’s not quite time for autumn yet:

As you can see, still in its summer finery.

Around here all the horse chestnuts took on an autumn colour in about August – you could tell which trees in a hedgerow were chestnuts as they were the only ones which were bright yellow. It was the same story last year. If you look more closely at the leaves you can see the colouring isn’t anything to do with autumn at all.


This is chestnut leaf miner damage. It’s caused by the larva of a moth which has become absolutely rampant in the south-east of England. It comes from southern Europe, and until recently was minding its own business over there, but in 2002 the first ones crossed the water and turned up here. I believe it’s now making its way north.

The Forestry Commission are keeping an eye on it, and they’ve asked people to let them know if it appears in places where it hasn’t yet been seen (a few more dots are ominously appearing on their map each year). Apparently, dramatic though it looks, it doesn’t do any damage to the tree, though if it appears at the same time as a nasty bark disease called bleeding canker the combination can be fatal.

It seems to me, though, that if you completely defoliate a tree every year for a number of years, it can’t do it much good in the long run. I love horse chestnuts – like most people I played conkers as a kid, and I love the fact that they’re so big and strong and sort of ancient English forest-y. They’re the sort of trees you use as landmarks, the sort of trees you rely on for your sense of identity and place. So to see them all looking so sick, so early in the year, makes me fear for their future. It feels all wrong, like daffodils in December. If this is global warming, you can keep it.