Blue Monday

Blue potatoes straight from the ground? - you'll be telling me the one o'clock gun doesn't shoot a cannonball next!?

So the blight got them in late august but i read that cut the shaws down before the spores can travel down to the tubers, leave for two - three weeks in the ground before lifting them. The slugs might have go them, but surely they had their full munching all my cabbage! Not bad a haul, but relatively small, and not a great yield from each seed potato - six on each roughly. Althugh ths year i used plenty of manure, next year need to feed regularly (with potash?)

• Still a beautiful autumn afternoon, leaving them to dry.
• The raspberries keep coming.
• Final crop of lettuce, by now rather woody and overgrown
• The challenge - Celeriac looking good!

Its a long way to Belmullet

So being away for the first two weeks of August marked the slugs perfect opportunity - as they swung in in their masses. Cabbages decimated but still retrievable...


Tomatoes bulking up well but not much sun to ripen them...

Lettuce's still producing with Romaine providing welcome juicyness to salad bowls bulk...

Spud hit by blight in mid August but should be retrievable having cut away the leaves... You're to wait 20 days before removing - which should be just in time for 13 Sept show. Mother in law had good advice re presenting vegetables at show - always on a doillie, and upside down (she says!)
Best use of produce though has to be the chutney made with my brother's plum glut in Belfast, my marrows from Edinburgh and apples from Maggie's mum's garden in peebles...International effort