Tag: Potato blight

Stale yeast – bad news!

This could be a bit of a shaggy dog story so I’ll keep it short. On Thursday last the steam oven packed up; not just no steam but no oven at all. The engineer can’t make it until Monday afternoon, but that’s just the beginning because he’ll have to order the parts and we could be without our main oven for ten days. But all’s not lost because we have a combination oven/grill/microwave and we also have a very elderly bread machine. Over the years I’ve tried every idea in the book for ways of making steam including saucers of water and wet bricks but none come close to the real thing.

So no sourdough for maybe ten days and yesterday I fetched out the jar of dried yeast and made a quick machine loaf – the resultant brick on the right was the clearest sign that the yeast had effectively died – it doesn’t last forever and I bought a kilo of the only yeast available in the panic days of the first lockdown. This morning I bought new yeast and the difference is clear – which doesn’t mean the bread machine is anything other than a quick work around in an emergency. I know without even cutting a slice that it will be fluffy and tasteless, but it makes half decent toast. The shame is that we’re right in the middle of processing tomatoes and this will limit our capacity.

Our neighbour on the allotment has just lost much of her tomato crop to blight. When we get a wet spell like the one we’ve been enduring here, it’s only a matter of days before blight appears and it’s a tragedy. This has been a truly weird season and it’s impossible to believe that the cause is anything but the oncoming climate catastrophe. Food security is one aspect of the crisis that’s not mentioned nearly enough.

But I’m also more directly affected by air pollution than most because I’m asthmatic. It was never a problem until we moved to Bath, but the air here can be so poor that I could barely walk to the surgery. One of the health factors that is affected particularly by microscopic particles is atrial fibrillation which, for me has intensified from occasional to continuous, and the polluting particles aren’t just from the burning of diesel fuel. Very heavy vehicles like diesel SUV’s obviously emit copious amounts, but it’s also been demonstrated that because electric vehicles are so much heavier they emit more particles from tyres and brakes. Children are ten times more likely to be killed or seriously injured if struck by SUV’s as opposed to smaller cars. When children – more often poor children are exposed to pollution their lungs never grow properly. I mention this because Bath is infested with these giant vehicles, often carrying just one driver. So the argument that ULEZ and 20mph speed limits are restricting some kind of human right is so obviously wrong that continuing to advance it is the exact equivalent to promoting cigarette smoking among children. Who stands to gain from this? Big oil, and car manufacturers, that’s who.

I remember the headline from a column in the Daily Mirror when I was a child, written by William Connor whose ferocious articles appeared under his pen name Cassandra. It was “This Septic Isle”. What goes around comes around!

A stranger on the allotment causes great consternation

I was just settling down to planting out some leeks for the winter when Helen came across with disturbing news. She had been poking about – although that’s not quite how she put it – on a disused plot when she had discovered what she thought might be Japanese Knotweed growing. This would be exceptionally bad news because it’s an incredibly difficult plant to eradicate without dousing the entire site with several tons of agent orange and keeping it under armed guard for six months. The treacherous thought passed through my head – look on the bright side it might be Himalayan Balsam which is almost as invasive but has prettier flowers. So we trekked across to the offending plot and had a look. Thankfully at this point she hadn’t rung the council, although she had mentioned it to the site rep. Anyway, whatever it was it wasn’t either of the nasty plants but I had no idea at all what it was, so I took some photos and promised I’d have a go at identifying it. Later on I had a scout around on the internet and discovered that it’s a golden kiwi vine – Actinidia chinensis. It’s a big and energetic looking plant so we’ll see if it bears any fruit this year; but people plant the wackiest things on their allotments and then when they leave, the next tenants often dig them up for fear that they’re weeds. We’ve seen many mature plants destroyed by newcomers who think they need to cluster bomb their plot and start again. Sometimes it’s a good idea to wait and see for the first year. Our vines and one of the white currants are both incredibly productive and neither of them cost us a penny apart from a bit of work. The same goes for the Lord Lambourne apple that was quickly escaping its espalier form from neglect when we took it on, but after a couple of hard prunings it’s looking the part once again and producing dozens of delicious apples for us.

Anyway, my forensic adventure revealed another useful neglected resource – a rampant patch of post flowering borage, which is a marvellous addition to a compost heap. So later I popped back and took a cut. It’ll grow back and flower again this summer with ease, and so we’ll share the spoils with the bees.

This is another of those transitional times on the allotment when we’re busy taking spent crops out and replanting the beds immediately. I harvested the last of the first earlies, around 28lbs of new potatoes. There’s just one more bed to clear because we like to get them safely out of the ground before the risk of blight. So spuds out and leeks in – that’s what I was in the middle of doing when helen shipped up. They’re lovely looking plants this year so we’re optimistic about a good crop. The peas, on the other hand, have been not been good. They came late and rather erratically and so the pea moth was able to invade before we got to eat them. There were a few pounds but nothing to get excited about – so, sadly, they’ll be coming up tomorrow if the rain lets up, and we’ll get something else planted in there.

One crop that’s totally reliable is the courgette. There are only two of us and we usually have far more than we need. To be honest it’s never been one of my favourite vegetables but growing them turns them into a wholly new treat. Often I sauté them and give them a splash of lemon juice just before serving them – maybe with a bit of finely chopped parsley. Lemon lifts the flavour in a way that salt never can, so it’s a perfect substitute. Another favourite way is to cut the courgettes in lengthways slices, dip them in beaten egg and flour and then fry them. OK it’s a bit of a faff, but then you alternate layers of courgette with pieces of mozzarella cheese and good, rich (home made) tomato sauce, pop in some hard boiled eggs and top it with bread crumbs and bake in the oven. It’s a recipe I got from Patence Gray’s wonderful book “Honey from a weed” – look for zucchini al forno. We cook it with aubergine as well. Finally I’m trying something new today; you might best think of it as an Italian antipasti – courgettes , fried golden brown and then marinaded with olive oil, vinegar, garlic and mint leaves. They’re maturing in the fridge right now.

And on the subject of tomato sauce, we make litres of it every year, along with passata; treating the passata as a base ingredient which almost always needs turning into something else – like proper tomato sauce. I must have been in a hurry last year because while I was checking the stocks today I found about 10 litres of very thin passata and so I tipped four bottles into a pan and I’m reducing it with a couple of onions, a couple of cloves of garlic and a big lump of butter. It’ll sit there simmering very very slowly until I can almost stand a spoon up in it, and then I’ll put on a pan of boiling water for the pasta.

The crops are coming off the plot so fast that it’s a job to keep up; but after a four hour stint on the allotment this morning we unloaded the trug and everything looked so beautiful my tiredness evaporated and I went back to the stove hungry and almost singing. Just occasionally you can feel a bit stale – especially being as confined as we’ve been for months – but the constant changes on the allotment adds enough texture to our lives to keep us upbeat.

And finally, I’ve bought a new hand lens; a 20x achromatic job with LED and UV illumination built in. I was so pleased with its capacity to reveal the smaller parts of grasses I put it around my neck on its lanyard today and tucked it inside my T shirt. When I got home and changed out of my overalls I noticed a strange swelling under my T shirt, around my navel. My God! I thought I’ve got a hernia ….. but it was just the hand lens. No wonder Helen was looking askance at me this morning.

Life’s rich tapestry – blight!

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They’ve gone down like ninepins on the site. After the recent wet weather it was pretty obvious we were in danger of  visit from Phytophthara infestans alias potato/tomato blight and yesterday we found the first signs on some of the outdoor tomatoes.  There’s no point in beating about the bush or hoping for the best, because with blight there is no best and the only remedy us to get the plants down (carefuly) pick up every scrap of debris and consign it all to the burning fiery furnace (local authority waste site).  My instincts would be to burn it all in the incinerator but rules is rules, and until October we are forbidden to burn anything on the site – and so, as I know I’ve mentioned, the waste begins its slow and expensive/high carbon footprint journey to the same fate at the council incinerator. With blight it’s not a sensible option to leave the diseased material lying around until later. So that’s the entire crop of small tomatoes gone, but fortunately the main crop are blight resistant “Crimson Crush” and they’re perfectly fine. Other allotmenteers on the site are trying different blight resistant varieties and we’ll see how they do this week.

However, the same blight affects potatoes and so today it was essential to dig all our potatoes except for the Sarpo Mira which have proved brilliantly blight resistant. This is, or rather will be, the second and third sacks full of potatoes this year, with at least two more sacks still awaiting harvest – far too many for us, and so they’re being shared around with our neighbours.  In the wheelbarrow are the last of the Arran Pilot and the Pink Fir Apple.  There are still some Red Duke of York to remove from their containers. Next year I’ll be a lot more careful about the potato order quantities, but I’ll probably grow the same varieties. I have to say, though, that we’ve yet to find the ultimate first earlies for this soil.  The Pilots are lovely, as were the Jazzy, but they didn’t quite recapture that waxy sweetness that you get with the best Jersey Royals.  That said though, even the Jersey Royals have dipped a lot in the last few years because the growers are not allowed (apparently) to fertilize the soil with seaweed any more for fear of salt build-up. That won’t stop us from bringing a load of seaweed back from North Wales next time we’re there!

Elsewhere on the allotment everything’s going well and we’ve just started eating our first apples from the cordons we planted two autumns ago. Of five cordons four have produced fruit with the James Grieve doing spectacular things.  The first off were Katy, which are very attractive but also very sweet and lacking the acidity that we both like in an apple – the grandchildren will love them! We also had the first sweetcorn yesterday.  It’s been netted and completely surrounded by courgettes so the badgers haven’t found them yet.  There’s a saying that you should put the water on to boil before you go out to cut the corn and it’s certainly true that you’ve never tasted sweetcorn until you’ve eaten it five minutes after it was cut.

We love many of the heritage vegetables and grow numbers of them wherever we can, but I’m so grateful for the work of the plant breeders for producing disease resistant varieties of potatoes and tomatoes. For organic allotmenteers like us, there’s no easy fix for diseases and the only way to outwit the pests is by building up the soil and using crafty inter and companion planting. But blight is on another scale, and breeding varietal resistance is by far the best plan. I’ve a lot more I want to write about some science I’ve just stumbled on, but I need to get this online first so I can go and bottle up the raspberry vinegar. Much more later!