Making the most of the great outdoors

It’s all about the weather this week as John sees the effects of a long dry spell

Gardeners and farmers have one thing in common. We just love to moan about the weather. Nearly all our crop failures can be weather related. After last year’s long wet spell it was hard to believe the long dry sunny weather from the beginning of April lasted up to the middle of June.

Plants just loved it as long as I got the hose out nearly every day. I kept checking the local weather forecasts which kept promising us some rain but it never arrived in Dundee.

Growth was lush on all crops, and flowers were plentiful from the spring crocus, daffodils and tulips, azaleas, rhododendrons and now the geraniums are flowering themselves to death.

The dry weather prevented most annual weeds from getting a start. Life was brilliant as the gardener was in paradise.

Thoughts of the coronavirus problems were far from our minds but nothing is perfect. The great weather also suited greenfly so plagues arrived on my roses, garden pinks, oriental lilies and in the greenhouse they had a go at my peppers and basil.

On the allotment it was the cut worms, leather jackets and cabbage root fly that had a picnic among my cabbage, kale, sprouts and cauliflowers.

However the sunny weather brought on my strawberries so Anna was able to start her jam making. Nets had to be used on all my strawberries as the blackbird likes to run up the row taking small bites from several berries.

Why can’t they just eat one whole one? Just when I was beginning to like our glorious summer, the forecasters

Growth was lush on all crops, and flowers were plentiful from the spring crocus, daffodils and tulips, azaleas, rhododendrons and now the geraniums

told us there were gales coming. This time they were right. Along came the winds from the north. Young autumn raspberry canes got shredded and blown over.

The supports just could not hold them. The wind was so severe it blasted the foliage on my blueberries, (no fruit this year) then whipped through my pear trees. The entire crop got blown off. Fortunately I hadn’t planted out my pumpkins or courgettes.

They have now been planted out and growing very strongly with the first flowers now in bloom. Climbing rose Dublin Bay lost flowers, broken off before they got a chance to open up.

Potatoes got planted in mid March, same time as last year, but in April just when the foliage was about a foot high we got a bad frost which blackened the soft leaves.

However they survived and I picked my first shaw in early June. Potatoes were not big, but then Casa Blanca is a salad potato and these new potatoes are very tasty.

That late frost also blackened my early strawberry Christine’s flowers, even although they were under a polythene tunnel but they still have