| #23 |
The only solution for beet leaf miner is mesh, unfortunately. They lay a lot of eggs (they look similar to hoverfly eggs, but they're a brighter white and often lays in multiples), so it's a lot of work looking for them, and they are hard to rub off. I grow all of my beetroot under Enviromesh, and I've grown chard quite successfully under scaffold netting. My second sowing of beetroot is in modules, not under mesh, and they've been hit by leaf miner. I've taken off all of the affected bits and squished the remaining eggs, and I'll give them a final check before planting.
The celery leaf miner is easier to control, I just nip off all of the affected portions of the leaf so the larvae never make it to adult stage, which seems to keep the population down for the rest of the year.
Looking back at my post, the red cabbage went in a raised bed instead of pots, due to lack of compost. We have only just been harvesting them in the past 2 weeks, so they do take up a bed for quite a lot of time even when overwintered. The overwintered cauliflower and calabrese went in a raised bed too, but luckily we had such a warm May they both were out by early June.
I haven't grown any summer squash, courgettes as planned, and I've given up on winter squash too. No peas or climbing French beans either.
Sweetcorn is only taking up 1 square metre of a raised bed.
The greenhouse tomatoes are in QuadGrows, the cucumbers in a wicking tub, and the chillies in Kratky hydroponic buckets. They're all doing really well, and strangely, so are the sweet peppers in the soil on the other side of the greenhouse, so I still have no idea what is wrong with the soil on the tomato side. The only issue with tomatoes is blossom drop from when we had those few days of hot weather in June, probably because the temperature in the greenhouse got too high, and the humidity too low. Now we've got another mini heatwave I'm trying to shade the greenhouse with some scaffold netting and a car windscreen reflector thing, and hoping to keep the humidity up by watering the pavers and misting the plants.
The celery leaf miner is easier to control, I just nip off all of the affected portions of the leaf so the larvae never make it to adult stage, which seems to keep the population down for the rest of the year.
Looking back at my post, the red cabbage went in a raised bed instead of pots, due to lack of compost. We have only just been harvesting them in the past 2 weeks, so they do take up a bed for quite a lot of time even when overwintered. The overwintered cauliflower and calabrese went in a raised bed too, but luckily we had such a warm May they both were out by early June.
I haven't grown any summer squash, courgettes as planned, and I've given up on winter squash too. No peas or climbing French beans either.
Sweetcorn is only taking up 1 square metre of a raised bed.
The greenhouse tomatoes are in QuadGrows, the cucumbers in a wicking tub, and the chillies in Kratky hydroponic buckets. They're all doing really well, and strangely, so are the sweet peppers in the soil on the other side of the greenhouse, so I still have no idea what is wrong with the soil on the tomato side. The only issue with tomatoes is blossom drop from when we had those few days of hot weather in June, probably because the temperature in the greenhouse got too high, and the humidity too low. Now we've got another mini heatwave I'm trying to shade the greenhouse with some scaffold netting and a car windscreen reflector thing, and hoping to keep the humidity up by watering the pavers and misting the plants.
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