The Potato Harvest 2013

A few days ago I harvested my potato's and was very happy with the amount I had grown. From a 12x5 foot bed I got 2 large sacks of King Edward potato's. The two bags are essential to this post and for all the wrong reasons. The reason being one of the bags is full of spuds with some sort of disease! Here is a particularly bad example of one....

Half of my crop has these 'scabs' all over them, which is really annoying! Though they look abit black in the picture, fresh out of the ground they were brown in colour. At first I thought I might have had blight though having never had any diseased potatoes of any kind I was not sure! So On to the RHS website I went to confirm my fears that it was blight. 

As it turns out the most likely candidate was not blight but Potato Scab!And whats worse it was probably my fault. The RHS says....

Common scab is caused by Streptomyces scabies and powdery scab by Spongospora subterranea f. sp. subterranea. Both are pathogenic micro-organisms and cause rough, scabby patches. Scabs appear during summer and persist on harvested tubers throughout storage.

It turns out the above diseases are at there worst through dry periods in the summer and I have to say I was not watering them enough. We had the hottest and dryest summers I can remember for a long time and certainly since I have been gardening and I was watering at the same levels as last year where we had a far wetter summer. So I have lived and learnt from this experience.

The spuds though won't go to waste, the most scabby ones have been boiled up as mash and fed the the chickens, they love it, Others with minor scabbing will be eaten first and hopefully the good bag will store well for winter. As a small back up I have some Nadine potato's growing in a tub for some Christmas new potatoes.

Bokashi Composting

I have not met many people yet who use the Bokashi composting system (thats a bad way of putting it as I do not exactly go round asking people if they use it) and this surprises me as its an amazing way to compost. If you have no idea what I am talking about I will give a brief idea of what Bokashi is!

Bokashi is a method that uses a mix of microorganisms to cover food waste to decrease smell. It derives from the practice of Japanese farmers centuries ago of covering food waste with rich, local soil that contained the microorganisms that would ferment the waste. After a few weeks, they would bury the waste that weeks later, would become soil.

Basically you buy or make your own Bokashi bran, this is just bran that has been inoculated with certain 'good' bacteria that help the decomposition of food waste. You place your food waste, which unlike any other composting methods can include meat and dairy, into a bucket. The bucket must have a lid that makes it air tight when fastened on as the process of decomposition with bokashi needs an anaerobic environment to work. When your waste is in, you sprinkle on some bran and close the lid. Repeating the process until the bucket is full. When this happens you leave your bucket and let all those micro-organisms get to work for a few weeks, the waste is basically fermenting or pickling. If when you open your bucket you smell a sweet pickled smell the process is working.

What is a little strange about this process is the fact that the waste you have put in looks no different at the end. Don't expect to find a pile of lovely compost just yet. If you buy a bokaski bin they are basically buckets with a tap, similar I guess to a wormery or a homebrew barrel. The tap will give you your first product! A very strong liquid fertiliser rich in good micro-organism. I dilute mine 1-100 and it works fine, other sites suggest this might be overkill so next year I will experiment with that a little. One you have captured you fertiliser and the food waste has fermented for several weeks you can do a couple of things with it. I myself put it in the compost bin. by digger a hole in the centre and then put my bokashi waste in. Making sure to cover it all over with a bit of soil or what's in the compost. Leave this for a month or too and it will degrade in the compost. I left mine in over winter and cleaned out in the spring and it was brilliantly black moist compost. Your other option is to dig it in to a trench in your flower or veg beds and cover over with soil. A few months down the line if you dig were you buried it you will find a very rich black soil.

Bokashi has many uses and it really worth taking a look at, if you are really into being green it something I think you should try. As I said above ALL food waste can be composted safely with bokashi! Here is a video that probably explains it all a little better than me.

A Poor Gardeners Addiction

I have been a busy bee in the garden recently with several little projects. Two of which have been garden planters for next year. With money being tight both have been made with free wood and things I had around the shed! I posted a few months ago a strawberry planter made from old waste pipe which worked well and I promised an up date on how well it was doing. Well nearly all is good with the planter however next spring I will make one big change to its design and that is to install an irrigation tube inside it. I found when watering it I was wasting large amounts of water and feed as it ran of and out of the planter. This addition will get its own post I'm sure.

I have to admit something now, I have a problem, a problem that is slowly taking over my everyday thoughts and effecting important decisions in my life! I am addicted to PALLETS! I have even started stealing them! I walk down a road and see one there I will come in the night and steal it! I spend hours of my life thinking about them, what i can make with them and where i can get some from! Its just not healthy anymore.....but I am just not ready to give them up.

Over the last year or so I have collected a few and made a few little planters here and there like this...

Its pretty ugly but my carrots did fine it it! I also built a garden theatre/shelf for plants, a gate and a bird house.

Now I've taken the next step in pallet addiction, THE WALL PLANTER!

This is an extremely common thing to do amongst the Pallet addicted peoples of the world, numerous examples can be found on the web if you go and look! This is my own very ugly one. Built with the pallet my greenhouse glass came on and some left over pallet bits. The back of the pallet is lined with some old hemp sack I had in the shed. I reckon many of you are looking at it and thinking "what a pile of ugly s#*t" and you would be right. But a lick of paint some compost and some plants it will come into its own! I hope.