Terry Walton tackles cabbage white butterflies and weeds!
But I’m also tackling the weeds and cabbage white butterflies!
August remains very unsettled, with sunny days followed by wetter ones. The days are noticeably shorter and the evenings have a cool, fresh feel. The mornings are unusually eerie as the early mists cling to the mountain tops, hanging high over the valley. It only takes a few hours of sunshine to clear this damp moisture, which leaves the crops covered in a fine coating of sparkling dew.
As the sun rises higher in the sky, the plot’s soon a hive of activity as hundreds of cabbage white butterflies take to the wing. They flutter around all those large cabbages looking for the perfect specimen on which to lay the eggs of their last brood of the year, so their caterpillars can eat their fill of crops before heading for drier places to pupate for the winter.
Much as I love the sight of these ‘beauties’, I don’t welcome them on my brassicas, all of which are safely covered with insect net! Some do get through and lay on leaves that touch the net so I turn over the leaves and rub off the little clusters of yellow eggs.
The pace of work gets less this month, with patches of ground emptying and only minimal sowing taking place. The weeds, however, flourish and must be stopped from broadcasting seeds or they’ll become next year’s nightmare!
I plant out sweetcorn at two-week intervals. The early sowing has made plants look a bit stunted in growth and they’ve sent up tassels rather prematurely. There are cobs forming on the stems, which may still prove plentiful but small. The later-planted sweetcorn looks far more robust and is growing better than the early-sown ones. It shows how important sowing conditions are to crop productivity.
My leeks look superb and are growing well in their tubes. It’s time to give them one more feed of Envii Seafeed Xtra to bolster their size and make them resistant to the autumn chills. This will be their last treat of the season so they can toughen up and give me great autumn and winter food.
Under my Enviromesh cover the main crop carrots have made a great amount of ferny foliage. I never thin or water them so it’s time to find out what roots await me below the soil. The first crop will effectively be ‘thinnings’, and as they’re used the remaining carrots will get bigger. I’m not disappointed with these young roots. Not watering them and growing them in stone-free, light soil has allowed them to make long roots, free of forking.