Hi, Tiny Gardener here…. If you’ve been following me over the past couple of months you will know that I lost quite a few plants to slugs. More recently, my container grown potato plants also took a turn for the worst.
I planted the seed potatoes in a large pot in late March/early April. The plants grew well, and looked super healthy through May and most of June.
In late June, I noticed some small dark spots appearing on the leaves. As it was only affecting a few of the leaves, I decided to remove those to see if it helped. Sadly, the black spots started to spread and the leaves turned yellow. I wondered if the plant might have caught blight, and worried that I would lose the whole crop. Although I wasn’t sure if it was blight or something else, I decided to try and save the tubers by acting fast and removing the rest of the foliage. I cut the plants off at the base, got rid of the foliage, and left the potatoes in the soil for another week so that the skins could harden.
When I harvested the potatoes a week later, I rootled around in the soil, not sure what I was going to find. To my surprise, there were lots and lots of seemingly healthy baby new potatoes. Some were tiny but most were perfect for a salad potato. All in all, it was a pretty decent harvest, in spite of the poorly leaves.
I’ve done a lot of googling since, comparing the photo that I took of the leaves (above) with photos online, and I feel fairly sure now that what I originally assumed was blight was in fact magnesium deficiency. This would make sense given that I was growing in a container – the crop could easily have depleted magnesium levels in the compost quite quickly. I’m not 100% sure though, so if anyone has a 100% certain diagnosis, do email in to let me know as it all helps with the learning process!!
Having harvested the potatoes, I now had lots of spaces in my tiny garden, from where I had lost plants to slugs earlier, and now the large container. Given that it was only early July, I decided I’d keep going and plant up some new things.
Since I wasn’t sure of the reasons behind why my potatoes had failed, I thought it was best to put some fresh compost in the pot before planting any new plugs. It is now full of little lettuce plants – I think they may do better in the pot than in the raised beds as hopefully they won’t be so easily attacked by slugs. Fingers crossed! I also planted some marigolds as I read somewhere that they can help deter slugs – I will literally try anything!!
While I was planning what to plug the other gaps with, in the raised beds, I had to consider plants that either don’t need a lot of space to grow or can be kept manageable by frequent harvesting. Wild Rocket is great for this as you can continually harvest the outer leaves to keep the plants small, so I ordered a pack of these and popped them in between my beetroot, lettuces and kale.
Baby Sweetcorn was my next choice. I had quite a successful attempt at growing ‘proper’ sweetcorn last year and the plants thrived all summer, but unfortunately the crop fell victim to a bug infestation. Since I knew the plants would grow well in the bed, I thought I’d try baby corn this time as they don’t need to be planted in grid formation for pollination (like the larger varieties do). This makes them perfect for filling any gaps as they’re quite compact.
Spring Onions have also gone into the gaps. They don’t take up much space at all and are relatively quick growing so I will be able to harvest these in a few weeks time.
I have learnt quite a lot so far and each time a problem occurs, I alter my growing habits so I can be more successful next time. It’s so nice to see the veg patch looking full again and to see everything growing so fast in this warm weather.