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| Happy memories - last year's Kestrel crop |
Phytophthera infestans!
In case the Latin has you confused, it's the equivalent of the 'Avada Kedavra' curse in the Harry Potter books, only for taters. Better known as Potato Blight. And right now, it's ripping through the allotment shrivelling the leaves of my beloved spuds and threatening to wreak havoc on the tubers too.
There's too much rain about to get a dose of Bordeaux Mixture on them - Bordeaux Mixture being a copper sulphate fungicide and a sort of all-round 'Expelliarmus!' solution to all manner of evil - so all I've been able to do is cut off the haulms of the worst affected and hope that the Sarpo cultivars live up to their 'blight buster' reputation.
Most disappointing is a significant failure of the usually reliable 'Kestrel' second earlies. I had thought the row of little stunted brown sticks was all that remained of a new cultivar for me called 'Ratte', of a similar shape to the Pink Fir Apple and also a salad spud, but sadly not. I lifted two roots and found they were the Kestrels after all, recovering three whole new potatoes in the process, one inevitably impaled by the fork. The funny little 'Ratte' taters are actually plentiful, but need more time to grow with the benefit of foliage to reach a decent size, so I'll just have to chance leaving the haulms on for a little longer.
Despite taking a hit on the foliage, the Highland Burgundy Red root that I lifted had produced a fairly decent crop and suggested the remainder could have benefitted from more growing time with their leaves on, but there was no sensible alternative to slicing off the top growth with the dark infested splodges everywhere.
Elsewhere, a modest triumph is a surprisingly good ongoing crop of raspberries, and we also did fairly well for blackcurrants as, for some bizarre reason, they don't seem anything like as popular with the blackbirds as the red and white currants were.
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| Raspberries - one day's crop. |
