Making progress!!

There were definate signs of progress at the weekend up on plot 103. Our sprouts are starting to grow tall with thick stems and will need the nets raised soon.

We had hoped to have these sprouts for christmas, but I'm wondering if we might not see them sooner.
Our cabbages are hearting up nicely and this one was ready to take home with the rest of the weekends bountiful harvest comprising of, yes more baby carrots and more beans which were all absolutely delicious.


Our corn is growing nice and tall and looks quite healthy. We would hope to see cobs around the end of september or so.

We were met with a bit of a surprise when we inspected our raspberry canes. It would appear our raspberries were not quite happy with their performance this year and have begun flowering again to give it another go. Hopefully this will mean we might have some autumn raspberries aswell as the small few we got in June.

Our brassica bed was hiding a little secret among the weeds and overcrowded cabbage and cauliflower. I gently pulled apart some of the leaves on our cauliflowers only to reveal these cricket ball sized heads looking tight and unblemished. I'll wait a bit to see if they get bigger before picking and keep and eye out in case the head splits before harvest. Hopefully we should be harvesting some over the next 2 weeks or so.

We had a rather scary visitor to plot 103 as we continued to wage our war on weeds. This guy was a good inch and a half long and got us thinking, hmmmmm I'm not sure this thing belongs here!!!! and that massive sting type barb looks absolutely terrifying....but I crept close enough for a picture anyway. I did some research to find out what it is and it turns out its a great horntailed wasp!!! Particularly large, and very mean looking, but apparently relatively harmless and quite common in Ireland where the female lays her eggs in wood using that enourmous stinger like barb, which is not in fact a sting at all.

Unfortunately it appears that our rooster potatoes may have blight. These were not sprayed and we found that some leaves had these brown blotches which seemed to go through to the underside of the leaf. I will post the photo up and ask the good people in the gardenplansireland forum if this is well and truly blight and if so, can our spuds be saved if we cut down the foliage early and hope that the tubers continue to develop for a while to an edible size.