Hi Simon, thanks for the information about Kestrel.  I have indeed tried Charlotte and also Vanessa, Cara and several more that I cant remember now.  These don’t do too well on my allotment.  I have to be careful because I have a lot of slugs.  I find the red skinned potatoes like Desiree and Vanessa are more slug resistant than white skinned varieties.  I don’t like growing Cara because you can’t get rid of it.  Every tiny spud you miss grows the next year.  I’m not sure that I am going to grow an early spud this year. 

Went down to the allotment , oh by the way happy Christmas to anyone reading this,  I got some really good brussel sprouts, parsnips and leeks.  We are going to use peas and beans from the freezer but I have had to buy carrots!!!!

We had some fantastic carrots this year but we have eaten all of them so I have had to resort to bought ones. 

I am continuing to clear the allotment.  I dug one of my big holes in the comfrey patch and buried the bean tops, some brassica leaves, the old pumpkin plants and the sweet corn.  I took out several comfrey seedlings and planted them in the really poor area below the comfrey patch.  This used to be part of the car park so it is full of bricks and stones.  Absolutely useless for growing anything useful. 

I took out the self seeded gooseberry bush because it always gets american mildew and passes it on to the other bushes.  It was also out of line and made spacing out lines of veg difficult. 

I started taking out the plum.  It is a real shame because this Victoria plum has served us well for about 20 years.  I took some of the branches off because they were going over onto Erics allotment but this allowed silver leaf disease to get in.  It did really poorly last year and I did not want it to affect my other plum.  I have started to dig around it but I have not reached the roots yet.  I have raised the allotment up about 18 inches so I will have to go down this deep before I even reach the bottom of the trunk. 

I pruned back some of the blackcurrent bushes, taking out the old wood.  They look a bit thin now but last season they produced a great deal new growth.  I was quite surprised because I pruned them back quite a bit last year as well.  Probably a good time to do this pruning as well because they were well and truely domant.  Some of the side shoots had rooted in the horse muck I put on them this year.  Dad said that he wanted some so if I write it here I will remember to take a couple down to him. 

I took down the ring culture pots after clearing them out of the greenhouse.  I know this is really late but I just have not got around to it until now.  I put the tomato plants in the green bin rather than the compost  because they had a little bit of blight on them. 

I’m not that sure that putting the soil from these pots will add blight to the soil but no potatoes will be growing in this ground for three years so I am not too worried.  �

I am beginning to think that Sante might be a good potato for my allotment.  It has a light yellow skin and flesh, with a dry firm texture.  It is a main crop variety but we shall see.  It is good for boiling, wedging, chipping and roasting.  It is resistant to both white cyst eelworm (Globodera pallida) and Golden cyst eelworm (Globodera rostochiensis) and I think that is is fairly resistant to blight.

The other potato that I will use is Kestrel.  This is a fairly modern potato with a good flavour, good yeilds.  It is fairly slug resistant.  It has a  white skin with blue eyes! It is fairly resistant to blight and has some resistance to eel worm.  It is good as a chip and baked potato.

I know that there is eelworm on the allotment and these potatoes might ameliorate their effect on the potato harvest.  I do have a problem with slugs as well because I try garden with nature rather than against it.  Â

Went up to the allotment on Sunday to get some vegetables.  The ground was not frozen thank heavens but the weather was very cold.  I started to clean up the allotment in earnest.  Took the bean tops, brassica leaves and the pumpkin stems down to the comfrey patch to bury.  Finished digging over the patch where the beans were.  Started to hand weed the onions.  They are coming fairly well but not as well as I thought they would.  Took out some leeks, parsnips, the last of the beetroot and brussel sprouts for the kitchen.  All were adequate but not spectacular.  Not a lot of canker on the parsnips they have done very well this year. 

Right so that I remember:

There are three major nutrients in fertilizers.

Nitrogen (N) Required for stem and leaf growth.

Phosphates (P) Required for root growth.

Potash (K) Required for flowers and fruit.

There is no such thing as plant food.  Plants generate their own food from carbon dioxide and water using light from the Sun. 

We like them are just wisps of air………

Do the days get shorter in the winter???

I thought that a day was 24 hours.  Does the Earth spin faster on its axis during the winter?

Fairly moderate frost of -1 or -2 degrees celcius today.  We are forcast another one for tonight. 

Frost will help to kill off a lot of the pests on the allotment.  If we have day long frosts then the number of slugs and snails in the spring will fall.  They will build up again during the summer if you let them. 

With very few frost this will not happen quite so readily - so more slugs and snails. 

This is why I like very cold and damp weather.Â

Too blooming cold.  Dug over a bit more of the beans area to warm myself up.  I left my spade at home and it felt like I had lost a limb.  I use it for vertually everything.  If I write it here then I will not forget it next time.  So, I used the fork.  Its just as good if not even better but you cannot take out a really good trench so the bean tops still have not been dug in.  Telephoned the man with the horse manure but he was out.  I hope he will be there next week.  Took out about 10 leeks but they were not very good at all.  Leek fly in almost all of them.  Compared with a few years ago, with leeks as thick as my arm, these are ones I would have thrown on the compost…

Staked the brussel sprouts and took off the lower leaves.  First harvest of brussels today. 

Although the beetroot are very small they will do.  Dug up 3 really good parsnips. 

So for evening meal we have had parsnips, brussel sprouts, leeks, potatoes, and pumpkin.  All grown as naturally as possibly and only potatoes and pumpkins from store.  Having said that, I don’t know how to grow things unnaturally.  The rest were in the ground at 4 o’clock (it was going dark) and eaten at 6 o’clock.  You can’t say fairer than that Tone.   For a bad year this is not too dispiriting.

The pea experiment has not worked out.  I need to plant them as soon as the potatoes are taken out or they do not have time to pod up.  Gobal warming might give me an advantage - but not that much of one though.Â

I may be mad but I went out today to buy some asprin to spray  to prevent pests and diseases on my allotment plants.  I really dont know whether this will work but there has been some serious work done on the salicylic acid signalling pathways in plants.  Salicylic acid is one of the main ingredients of asprin.  Originally it was extracted from the bark of the willow but now I think that it is manufactured. 

Corne M. J. Pieterse and Leendert C. van Loon.  (1999) Salicylic acid independent plant defence pathways.

Thomma B, Penninckx I, Broekaert W, Cammue P,  The complexity of disease signaling in Arabidopsis. 

Ryan CA (2000) The sytemin signaling pathway: differentila activation of plant defensive genes.

Glazebrook J (2001) Genes controlling expression of defense responses in Arabidopsis - 2001 status.

To name a few.  There seems to be two ways that plants protect themselves from pests and diseases.  One of which is the salicylic acid(asprin) and the other involves jasmonic acid and ethylene.  The jasmonic acid and the ethylene pathway seem to have more to do with protection when the plant has been physically damaged allowing disease to enter the wound.  Salicylic acid pathways seem to be triggered when a pest or disease finds its own way into the plant. 

Now my question is, will spraying plants with asprin trigger the defense response and if so what dosage can be given without damaging the plant?  Will the salicylic acid be able to pass into the plant from its surface?  Now, although this is a naturally occuring chemical, spraying it willy nilly over plants that I will later eat, without knowing its effects both on plants and myself, might seem to be a little foolhardy.  I am not sure whether the researchers would think that this would be a good idea. 

A little biochemistry is a very bad thing…. However, it should take very little salicylic acid to trigger the plant and trick it into thinking it is being attacked.  So I propose to start with very weak dosages.  What one man’s ‘weak’ is another man’s ‘blooming heck that much’.  I propose to put one asprin tablet into 10 litres of water and see what that does. 

Not the best way to do field trials but what can I say, I’m an allotmenteer. 

I have just obtained two solar powered sunbeds and I am going to install them in my shed at the allotment.  I already have a solar powered clothes dryer installed so that if I get caught out in a shower I can easily dry my clothes.  (Think about it …deck chairs and washing line)