Don' it make my brown eyes (and potatoes) blue

Spotted the first tell tale signs of blight on my potatoes today. The great potato famine that wiped out the entire crop in Ireland was caused by blight and I ain't taking no chances. It is a real bugger, we had it last year, consequently we had hardly any potatoes and NO tomatoes.

I spent a very happy? hour with my sprayer and covered all the at risk plants with Bordeaux mixture - a copper sulphate concoction that is meant to prevent blight if you don't have it and slow the deterioration down if you already have it. It is meant to be organic although some people much cleverer than me don't agree but I think it is better than having no vegies to show for all the hard work. Quite a fetching blue haze now adorns the potatoes, tomatoes and grapevines don't you think?


It's not all bad news though. The forecast is for sun over the next couple of days and the barometer here at home seems to be bearing that out. We need a good bit of sunshine for a couple of days to dry everything out so that we can get to cut the grass which, at the moment is threatening to take over the whole veg patch. I have been planting, potting on and sowing between showers and the greenhouse is choc-a-block with things waiting to go out once the rain stops.

The great success story at the moment is the strawberries - just look at that!


And the fig that I thought had fallen at the first frost last year has started to sprout new growth so, I have been "fussing" over it in the hope that it makes it through the summer so that I can get another chance at over wintering it.

This is it, close up:

And this is it in its pot just to give you some scale:


Huge learning curve, this good life lark!