RIP tomatoes

Well, it was a bit of a disappointing session at the plot today. The tomatoes had succumbed to blight and were looking awful. I removed the fruit and threw the foliage and roots in with the rubbish. I have brought the fruit hope to try and ripen some of them. Lots of the fruit is a bit small and young but 10-12 or so may be mature enough to ripen ok. I'll either get a banana to help them out or just cover them with newspaper. Against my intuition, Internet research suggests that tomatoes need to be kept in the dark to ripen quickly not in the sunlight.

The main crops don't look too bad - they are not yet revaged by blight (see piccie below). The tomatoes actually had sections of stem that had turned black. That doesn't seem to have happened to the potatoes yet. I have left them in for now. I cut the foliage from the last row of earlies though.



I picked a few courgettes for some friends. The sweetcorn amongst them had clearly be attacked by a badger. The same badger who seems to be terrorising other allotmenteers' carrots and runner beans. Some of the sweetcorn has been ripped out completely - it wasn't just nibbled cobs. I put some chicken wire around some of the corn (see piccie below) and have pinned it down with tent pegs.



One of the courgette plants had strange looking leaves (see piccie below). I am guessing this is mosaic virus. I know nothing about this so I will do some research...



I planted out 8 All The Year Round cauliflower plants and transplanted 4 Florence Fennel seedlings. I thought I had more fennel seedlings than that but I guess that some of these were eaten or gave up.