Much-needed rain

That’s our summer salads taken care off.

We also planted out some of the brassicas.

Sometimes I wonder why we bother growing these vegetables. First we have to try to prevent the dreaded club root.

In order to do this the soil needs to have a PH balance of between 7.0 and 8.0. Most of the soil on the plots is well below.

So needs to be rectified.

We do this by adding slaked lime or wood ash. I also place a few pieces of rhubarb in the hole when transplanting these plants .

The high concentration of oxalic acid is said to help control this decease. We also have the maggots of cabbage root fly eating away at the roots, slugs, mealy aphids and caterpillars snacking on the leaves, and to top all this off we have the pigeons, these little darlings can strip a bed of cabbages in just a few hours.

Everyone has weird contraptions of garden netting, chicken wire, or strings of CD’s blowing in the breeze, to try to prevent this happening.

There’s so many other lovely vegetables that can be grown without all this trouble so who do we bother? Yet year in year out we grow brassicas.

I guess it’s just the challenge of trying to get a decent crop.

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