Summertime and the Livin’ is Easy
The Bannockburn House Trust Garden Blog
– by Margaret Pollock
After such a warm, sunny spring this year it has come as no surprise to us that we have a bumper blackcurrant crop this year. Our bushes were planted in the spring of 2020, just as we all went into ‘lockdown’ so this is their fifth year and whilst they have given us a great harvest every year since, this year has been incredible.
We started picking them on June 25th and we are still picking this week, July 30th with a couple of bushes left to strip. We used them for jam which we sold in our shop, froze several pounds and gave some more away to other food groups in Forth Valley.
I can recommend ‘Blackcurrant Flapjacks’ as a great way to increase your fibre and get one of your daily five fruits, they are delicious on overnight oats and of course they make fantastic ice-cream.
The bushes we are ‘currantly’ growing are ‘Big Ben’ and ‘Ben Connan’ both bred at the James Hutton (formerly the Scottish Crop Research Institute) and they come with an RHS Award of Garden Merit, a recommendation of excellence. They have been bred to suit a northern climate: disease resistant, frost tolerant at flowering time and, ultimately, for top flavour. ’Big Ben’ ripens in June, is a prolific fruiter and has some of the biggest berries I have ever seen, some almost as big as small grapes! It yields as much as 4.5kg (9lbs.) per bush.
‘Ben Connan’ which ripens in July/August is also a heavy fruiter and can produce upwards of 3.5kg (7 lbs) per bush.
Did you know that 95% of the UK blackcurrant crop is made into ‘Ribena’ ?
Our first early potatoes have been harvested. We grew ‘Casablanca’ (RHS AGM) this year, a recently created potato variety with a heavy, uniform crop, which was recommended to us by the seed potato growers. It has certainly proven to be a winner. From three plants we harvested 17lbs of potatoes – quite a return.
Growing early potatoes can be a good way to avoid the dreaded potato blight, a summer disease that rapidly decimates the crop and which caused the Great Potato Famine in Ireland in the 1850’s. Blight is spread by a fungus and that makes it difficult to contain but even if blight hits your plants, your potato crop is thankfully not a complete write-off. You can potentially save your potato crop if you immediately cut down everything, remove all the foliage and stems and leave the area undisturbed for three weeks. This gives enough time for spores to be killed in the soil and not infect the potatoes when they are lifted.
There are two types of blight – early and late and they thrive in different conditions. The most common is late blight which attacks the foliage and potatoes rapidly devastating the entire crop. It thrives in warm, wet, and humid weather, spreading quickly when there are two consecutive days over 10°C (50°F) and with 6-10 hours of 90% humidity. If you want to check growing conditions then look up the James Hutton Blightspy website
https://blightspy.huttonltd.com/#/ which gives you access to temperature and humidity readings in your locality so you can be prepared.
Sometimes it can just get a bit too hot out in the garden when the clouds have gone and the sun is beating down. Wouldn’t it be lovely to curl up somewhere cool and shady and have a long sleep? But where is the best spot? Under a mature lime tree with spreading branches and a cool breeze, or in a shady arbour decked with climbing roses and honeysuckle.
Well, if you are Drummond then it is none of the above and clearly the simplest answer is just to lie down under the Artichoke leaves, leaning hard up against their strong stems, serenaded by the buzzing bees gathering nectar from the borage and oregano flowers. He knows how to live!
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