With Daylight Saving over this coming weekend, hopefully you’ll be appreciating a bit more light in the mornings! It’s Full Moon and ideally you want to be focussing on root crops.
Fabulous fennel
This week we’re planting Florence fennel, a vegetable that’s becoming more popular every year. We think that’s because it’s easy to grow, and great raw in a winter slaw or baked as a roast vegetable.
We might have been a bit premature in our last blog, saying the temperatures were cooling. But it’s fairly safe to say it now! We’re still waiting for the clear days with bright blue skies we usually get in March though, as rain still seems to be the order of the day. At least our hydro lakes are all full! Continue reading 16 March 2018
Full question:
I have managed to grow a large eggplant with lots of flowers again this year but still no fruit. The flowers fall off. What am I missing?
Our response:
Eggplants haven’t done so well this year and we think it’s because there haven’t been so many bees around this summer due to all the rain we’ve had. That will affect your pollination. You can pollinate by hand – take a small paintbrush and flick it around gently inside the flowers which will result in pollen being transferred from the stamen to the stigma. This can be quite successful.
You may be short of potassium in your soil – comfrey is full of potassium, so making a comfrey tea is worthwhile and sheep pellets have a reasonable amount of potassium in them too. Potassium helps plants to set fruit.
Also two plants are better than one – if bees are around and about, there will more chance of them doing their pollinating work successfully.
Good luck! 🙂