Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Water misery ....

My garden was underwater for about a week.

In the one half where I have raised beds the water was able to drain away more easily, but the other half is still completely soaked and the earth has started to smell terrible as it rots.

The potatoes were in that area and they became infected with potato blight, so between the smell of the wet ground and the rotten potatoes it's terrible!

The potatoes, cauliflower, kohlrabi and lettuce are a loss. Luckily I took my shallots and onions out before the flooding and, although small, they are adequate. The tomato plants are struggling along. No blight on them, but they look very unhappy - a sickly yellow colour.

Leeks and carrots are ok. Beans and sweetpeas (lathyrus) are drowned.

The only plants that really seem to like the water are the gemsquash (Rolet) which are clambering everywhere. They are more vigorous than the butternut squash which are also struggling to keep up with the water damage. The fruit trees and bushes have done extraordinarily well with a ten kilo harvest from my plum tree and several kilos from the berry bushes. The plums were early and the apples look as though they will also be early.

Today I plan to put black semi-porous sheeting under my butternuts so that they can grow across the sheeting without the leaves rotting. Hopefully it will make a difference.

4 comments:

Kim said...

I'm so sorry to hear that you have lost so many things from the flooding... it is so unfortunate for your garden to be affected so badly...

Anonymous said...

That's a shame about all the flooding. I'm glad you were able to rescue what you did. It doesn't seem like many people had success with their gardens this year, with all this weirdness in the weather.

Cottage Smallholder said...

Poor you, flooding when everything was going so well. And you have invested so much time in the garden.

I've never known a summer to be this bad.

petetow said...

Flooding is something you never know is going to happen, in my garden I have never had any flooding ever yet one day I awoke to a swamp, the ground was almost like a marsh even the rotary washing dryers had fallen over because the ground was so wet and soft, all my plants (well almost all) died, my veg patch disappeared under about two inches of water, I was devistated, I had never had anything like it before or since.