Kitchen Garden Forum

They're still looking pretty healthy. Just finishing off my last small outdoor ,now wrinkled ones in soups!

My visit to the greenhouse this evening was disappointing - blight has got in! My beefsteaks are probably not going to ripen even though I rescued them, the stems close to the fruit were pretty affected. My orange plums that have taken over the whole greenhouse also have blemishes on the stems but got the big ones off further back that is showing no signs just yet. Not hopeful but hey it is October!

The weather is atrocious here gale force winds and torrential rain on top of that the central heating boiler has decided to play silly buggers , I'm hoping I can get it fixed before Carol comes out of hospital

Went to RHS Wisley earlier this week and took this shot of their celeriac in the vegetable garden which were all between 4 or 5 inches in diameter, and some even bigger. I notice that all the bulbs are virtually all above the soil surface and wondered if all the surrounding soil is regularly scraped away to allow them access to sunlight and increase their growth because none of them had any of the usual massive network of straggly roots showing.

Do you think they have never developed, because most of the root’s life has been spent above ground, or somebody has gone round and painstakingly snipped them all off?. My celeriac are a fraction of that size and the entire bulbs are all below the soil surface.

Primrose, I think I mentioned earlier this season that my celeriac has done really well this year and I have certainly harvested 'bulbs' at least cricket ball size if not larger. You mention the bare plants: I continually pull off the lower leaves, certainly when they show any sign of yellowing. And this year I watered them more than ever before and also gave them a feed with liquid Growmore at least once a week. This seems to have worked.

I must confess I haven,t given mine much extra fertiliser apart from a few chickenmanure pellets mid season anlthiugh they,ve been watered regularly and wonder if its too late in the growing season now to expect them to develop much more in size.

Hi Primrose!

My celeriac pushes itself up & so long as you pull the lower leaves off it continues to spread in width rather than height and the roots stay under the ground. It is difficult to have the heart to do it when they are tiny though! I'm reassured that those have the green tinge to them. I thought mine had been attacked by some mould or the like and it does get worse as the winter season progresses.

I am going to harvest mine earlier than normal & store them as if left in the ground they seem to go hollow. Will see how that goes!

Mine have done really well this year, so very pleased....they range from 6 TO 8 inches across. I have fed them once a week with a liquid seaweed feed and i'm sure this has helped hugely. I started off foliar feeding them, then turned to a stronger dosage for root feeding. Something else I did was, in between each celeriac along the row, I scooped out some soil, to hold the water when I watered them and i'm sure this made a huge difference to them.
Primrose, if they haven't started forming yet, I think there is very little chance of getting a crop off them.

Mine look like I might get a small crop, this will be a first.

What a lovely autumn day it's been today! I dug the sweet pea and runner bean trench, filled it with crumpled newspaper, home-grown compost and manure and also picked a bunch of dahlias, chrysanthemums, cosmos and ammi.
Bats are out tonight and a tawny owl just landed on a telephone pole down the road.....

Pity it didn't last - 32.5mm rain since midnight and counting, not 11 o'clock yet!

As Robo says, over 52mm (2") at 4:30.

Geoff I bet that has gone up a bit by now ,we are only down the road from you ( a long road ) and it's torrential here

Interesting, because so far (7pm, Wednesday) we have only had 10mm, but then we are further east and a little bit further north than you, Geoff.

Seems we were on the edge of the worst

Some parts of Cumbria saw more than 8ins (206mm) of rain fall in less than 24 hours, according to provisional figures from the Environment Agency.

We went to Morecambe this afternoon and the Lune was well out of its banks.

Thankful for accurate rainfall radar prediction today. Mowed and strimmed all the grass just in time for it to start at 2:30 as forecast. Driest it's been for sometime, getting back to normal now with well past ½" already.