Inevitably as a vegetable grower you will come across at least one pest or disease in a growing year, the trick is to arm yourself with the knowledge of how to prevent, divert or get rid of pests when they arrive, so your vegetables continue growing without too much interruption. In this summer series of [...]
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During May when broad beans are flowering you may find ants running up and down the stems feeding from small dark black spots. These dark black spots are clusters of tiny blackfly (or black bean aphids) and the ants will be farming them and eating their honey dew secretions. If you have ants, you usually [...]
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Anyone who’s grown potatoes from tubers will have experienced one or more of these chitting disasters. However most potato chitting problems can be solved so never fear you will still get a good crop of potatoes in the end! What is Chitting? Chitting (or pre-sprouting in America) is a way of forcing the potato tuber [...]
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Frost is one the things that gardeners always have to look out for when growing tender plants during the winter and early spring months. Unfortunately even though my broad beans had a cloche over them, the outer rows have succumbed to the effects of frost. Please see my February Growing Update for more about my [...]
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With the cold snap of snow lasting for a little while longer, I have enjoyed seeing snowy vegetables on other peoples blogs like Kale and Brussels Sprouts on Nip It In The Bud’s Winter Wonderland Post and Leeks on Eight by Six’s blog and I was interested to find out how the snow is affecting [...]
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I would have thought all the caterpillars would have gone by now off into hibernation for winter but no, the tiny green and brown caterpillars on my Plot 1 have been tucking into their last supper of my winter seedlings of Japanese kale, mustard greens and for afters a few bites of my pointed spring [...]
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It just shows you when I’m in holiday mode things completely slip my mind like my potatoes. I harvested them last weekend just before I went on holiday and left them in a tub open to the air, light and moisture in my mini greenhouse to dry off before I washed and checked them over [...]
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As I’m taking a break this week, I though I’d reminisce and post a summary of all my Pests and Diseases posts. My posts contain lots of information with regards to symptoms, treatment and prevention tips, all with closeup photographs of the pest or disease wherever possible. If your vegetables are suffering from a pest [...]
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With the warm and wet weather we have been having over the past few weeks, the conditions are ideal for the deadly disease called Blight to spread through Tomato and Potato crops. A fungus called Phytophthora infestans creates spores which become air-borne via the wind and rain. These spores can land on tomato or potato [...]
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In the past week or so I have had a couple of people ask me questions about pests and diseases that they have found on their beans, so I thought this might be a helpful post about the problems that can be associated with beans and peas. 1. Pea Aphid The Pea Aphid is a [...]
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