....no, not the flavoured ice-crush-making machine from the 80s, but Jack Frost who has been paying us a visit.
I spent yesterday evening earthing up the potatoes and covering the strawberries (well the ones that are in flower, anyway) with old straw. There wasn't enough soil to earth up all the spuds as I hadn't left as much room between the rows of the earlies as I had for the main crops. Luckily I remembered my mum had given us some old net curtains so I covered up the remainder with them.
THEN I realised I shouldn't have put the curtains straight onto the potatoes as this wouldn't protect them so much, so took it all off again, bent some chickenwire over the rows and put the curtains back on, weighing them down with bits of wood. Phew!
After all that we didn't get frost in Norwich! But other parts of Norfolk did and some of my workmates said their potatoes had been damaged.
The next couple of nights are supposed to be frosty again, so I decided to leave the plants protected for a while longer. Hope it works! And I hope none of the other plants I've got outside are susceptible to frost. Potatoes and strawberries were all I could think of. All other tender plants are still in the lean-to, though I do need to start hardening them off, so they toughen up a bit before planting out. Exciting!
We had frost damage to our potatoes but this has happened before and usually they recover but it is a setback. Strawberry flowers are also struggling to set fruit.
ReplyDeleteHmm, well although we did get some frost it didn't seem to affect anyone's pots that were uncovered. But ironically, when I took the covers off mine today, they had been a bit damaged by the chickenwire rubbing against some of the leaves. You just can't win eh!
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