WEEK 1 WEEK 2 WEEK 3 WEEK 4 WEEK 5 WEEK 6 WEEK 7 WEEK 8 WEEK 9 WEEK 10 WEEK 11 WEEK 12 WEEK 13 WEEK 14
Welcome to the fifteenth ‘Follow Us’ update of 2021, a space where we talk about how we’re growing in our own Ergrownomics raised planters this year, and walk you through how you can achieve the same results at home, yourself...Feel free to follow along, and be sure to follow us on Instagram & Facebook to never miss an update! As usual, key is at the bottom, so scroll down now!
The weather has generally been sunny and dry this week, with daytime temperatures around 200C and night-time temperatures of 120C, both slightly below the seasonal average.
‘Misticanza di Lattughe’ in Planter 1 is continuing to perform well but removing whole baby lettuces is failing to reduce the extent of overcrowding, with gaps being rapidly infilled and plants becoming increasingly ‘leggy’. The red and mottled lettuces have both gone backwards this week and are clearly being suppressed by the more aggressive green varieties. Opinion is divided on the taste of the lettuces in the mix and the bitter chicories are not liked by all! They require ever more strongly flavoured and greater quantities of dressing. We cannot see children being big fans of this mix.
Carrot ‘Imperator mix’ have taken a leap forward this week having clearly benefitted from last week’s thinning. The plants are vigorous, their colour is good and remain free of pests and diseases. Any occasional aphids are picked off by hoverflies (of which we seem to have a large number both outdoors, in our greenhouse and in our polytunnels!) A number had sadly met their demise in spiders’ webs hanging between the planters within the greenhouse, but this was addressed by a quick vacuum we’ve since added to our weekly to do list! As a point of note, we use an old Henry for this and wouldn’t use the house Dyson (as this would cause a row and the battery life is rubbish anyway).
Lettuce ‘Green Salad Bowl’, ‘Red Salad Bowl’ and ‘Oak Leaf Green’ in Planter 3 have deteriorated with the growth of ‘Red Salad Bowl’ slowing markedly. ‘Green Salad Bowl’ and ‘Oak Leaf Green’ have in contrast grown in height and developed a conical form with increasingly compact concentric whorls of new growth; this is a clear ‘tell’ that the plants are beginning to bolt. This has been accompanied by a change in taste from sweet to bitter and an increasing toughness to the leaves. It was planned to harvest the lettuces for 4 weeks so the change is as anticipated, however, it does show the need for repeated sowing of summer lettuces to maintain a supply of high-quality salad leaf production. This is in stark contrast to winter line lettuces which can crop reliably for 4 months if harvested correctly! We plan to experiment with basil grown under a cloche in Planter 3 as we haven’t tried any herbs yet this year, and the cloche should provide the necessary combination of high regulated temperatures and humidity to grow basil well - albeit with a slight risk of leaf spot due to fungus which enjoy much the same conditions! For this reason, we’ll probably hedge our beds with four varieties and be ready to take the cloche away if it seems to be doing more harm than good! However, it should at the very least increase the speed and reliability of germination which will be progress (we did very badly with a British bred outdoor basil last year, which wasn’t any match for the wet and cold of a Herefordshire summer!)
Dwarf French bean ‘Speedy’ in Planter 4 has continued to grow reasonably well but there remains a marked difference in the height of the plants which survived from the original planting and the replacements which germinated some 3 weeks later. We have now removed surplus seedlings from the margins of the planter (sown as backstops!) to achieve the correct number of plants (which is 10). For the record there are 4 seedlings in rows 1 and 3, and 3 seedlings in the middle row, which are positioned at offsets from the seedlings in the rows alongside. This sounds a bit involved but is the best way of making use of the available space.
Our star of the show this week is a hoverfly, which strangely landed on the nozzle of our sprayer just before we were about to apply a dilute soap solution to our chillis in the greenhouse, in order to treat an outbreak of aphid. We took this as a sign that the hoverfly could handle it, which is what happened, although we did assist by dislodging a few aphids by tapping the stems and squashing those removed (always rewarding!)