Gadget time

Will it work? Or is it just another gadget promising the earth (forgive the pun) from a piece of plastic? Eventually, I got my French beans planted out at the weekend. The slight saving grace is that with the delay I missed the tearing winds that have stripped leaves from trees. Still, they haven't been happy beans lately, constrained even in their root-trainer modules. And they're my precious French French beans, brought back from last summer's holiday.



The idea is that molluscs' tiny brains and impressive gmynastic powers will be flummoxed by having to turn that sharp corner underneath the rim. I suspect that big snails might find it too much, but that slugs will just pop up happily in the middle of the ring and munch away, but I'll find out if we manage to get to the plot one evening this week.

And they're expensive pieces of plastic, so of course I have more beans than barriers. These defenceless beans will just have to take their chances. I'm trying to look on it as a controlled experiment, but I feel a pang at having abandoned this lot at the end of the row.

One lot of plants in, another lot earmarked for coming out. We have to face it that the raspberries have had it. Even though new canes came through in the spring and began to put out leaves, they're withering. Fruit that has already formed is just shrivelling up. The canes have been fed, watered, mulched and watered again, but we have to face reality. I don't know if they have a disease, or if they just don't like their location, but I don't have time and energy to embark on a research and treatment programme. I am puzzled, because I come from a family for whom raspberries are an annual surfeit, to be given away to passers-by. My father has a rota of friends whom he invites to pick his berries, and happily receives home baking and jam in return. I thought raspberries just grew, so it's quite a blow to discover that I haven't inherited the family raspberry gene.

Blight, already?

Nothing sweeter than a May evening at the plot? Yesterday evening's quick jaunt to the plot, which I expected to be balm after a fraught working day, turned out to be nothing of the sort. "Never construct", wrote one of the French dudes I wrote my thesis on. Gustave, you were right.

For a start, it was bitterly cold, that bone-chilling cold peculiar to the East coast of Scotland in May (and June and...). We were muffled up to the ears in anoraks and wished we'd worn gloves. We found the grass verges and 'lawn areas' of the plot romping away - well, we'd expected that after two weekends away, but all the same it looked unkempt. We met another plotholder whom my husband knows from church, and her news was all about her husband's stay in hospital and his declining strength. We looked around the plot and knew we had no time to do anything much, but could see so much that needed doing. I hoed between the shallots and onions. I walked to the gate and back with a distraught plotholder who had lost his keys to the site and couldn't otherwise get out. The bitter wind blew.

We stared glumly at the raspberries, and decided to cut our losses with the row that hasn't come through this year. And then we saw a potato plant that hadn't been there two weeks ago, with what looked suspiciously like blighted leaves. And then I noticed that our new season's crop, just peeking through, was also looking rather nasty about the leaves.


We dug out the rogue plant, but left the others for the time being. After checking in my Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening, I now wish we'd dug them up too, or at least taken off the affected leaves. It seems that rogue potatoes from a previous year's crop (or 'volunteers' as they're known) are a prime source of blight. I'll have to see if I can steal time to get along to the plot tomorrow evening to whip out the three plants that are affected.

Good news? Well, I got a special offer on pot-grown raspberries from Ken Muir, and ordered a replacement six canes. They're a variety called 'Tulameen', named after a community in British Columbia. This pleases me a lot! Apparently they come through late each year, so are less susceptible to frost, and are pretty winter hardy, having been bred in BC.

But just now, it's slow going indeed.