Lupin Update

So a few days ago I posted about one of my lupins looking like it was about to pop its cloggs (die). The leaves gad all wilted and the flowers were turning brown and limp to one side. From that post David Innes replied and gave me a check list to see if I could work out what the problem could be.... So I did. I looked over the plant to see if I could find anything abnormal above soil level other that the obvious wilting there was nothing.

I then cut one of the stems to see if I could see any discolouring or rot, nothing again. So finally I I dug it up and looked at the roots.

I didn't even need to wash the dirt from the roots to see the problem, large parts of it had turned to a squiggy mush and turned a rotten brown. And where the root met the stem it was semi rotted turning blacky brown and hollow. THATS WHY IT WILTED! The Stems were not getting water nutrition because of this rot.

What caused this, I do not know but all my other lupins will be being watched carefully. It could be disease or it could be the soil conditions i suppose that instigated the down fall of my poor Lupin.

Lupins and Fusarium Root Rot? Or something else completely!?

Its still early in the summer and I have few plants in flower, my Lupins being an exception. They are in full bloom and looking amazing as they always do. However over the last couple of weeks one of the plants has started to look really ill. Nearly all the leaves have become yellow and wilted.

As you can see from the picture it is looking in a right state, the flowers are now even starting to go the same way. As soon as I noticed I looked at the RHS website to see if I could find a cause, but powdery mildew and leaf spot the only too listed diseases didn't fit the bill. I may be wrong and being a hypochondriac about my plants the symptoms seem to point to root rot or Fusarium wilting. Two terms when applied to Lupins means absolutely nothing to me.  The literature I have found online has been rather wordy and does not state if there is anything I can do... just the symptoms and the causes. This blog article was the most indepth info i could find and probably inseminated my mind that my lupin has Fasarium Root Rot.

In any case this Lupin looks like it is on its last legs and I will probably dig it out in the next day or two. My other lupins are so fare unaffected and Iwant to keep it that way whatever the reason it is wilting on me.

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.