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I did a small experiment with my potatoes this year as I wanted to know more about chitting. I left several potatoes in an egg tray in the kitchen and as expected they put out several shoots each after a couple of weeks. Generally I find 1 cm (half inch) shoots to be the easiest to handle:

On half of them I removed all the shoots except one, and put those in one half of my “raised bed” (the soil was apparently very loose when I prepared the bed and later it sunk under its own weight. Guess I have to throw in more compost to justify the name ). In the other half of the bed I put the rest of the chitted potatoes, which had several shoots each:

It turns out that the difference is not that big. Sure the ones with several shoots immediately puts up several stems (lower half of the picture), but the other half with only shoot is not limited to having only one stem. So both kinds are growing at the same speed and are equally robust:

(Notice my experiment with a soaker hose; it’s not working that well in my particular set up )

These are the ones that had single shoots:

And these had several shoots before planting:

As time goes by it’s getting even more difficult to distinguish between the two. It will be interesting to see the difference in yield when time comes to harvest.

This is my newest weapon against killer slugs: A small pie tin with a slight modification:

Cut an entrance hole for the slugs:

Fold the top of the entrance hole a bit to avoid sharp edges:

Turn the tin upside down, put some slug “poison” under it, and secure it by leaving some weight on top. It will keep the rain from reaching the pellets, so they’ll stay dry:

I’ve set up one trap at both ends of each bed that I have.

And as usual the cat just wanted to point out that I shouldn’t be exercising too much control over nature, so it flipped one of the traps open during the night and played with the pellets. It must be really boring around here during the nighttime

Okay, maybe it’s not essential or life threatening if you can’t grow peaches in Scandinavia, but boy do freshly picked peaches taste good. And it seems like my little peach tree have survived with all its leaves still on the tree. Earlier I’ve had problems with peach leaf curl but I put up a plastic shield to protect the tree against the rain:

There was certainly a greenhouse effect due to the shield and the tree is now full of small fruits in development:

Some of the leaves that were close to the plastic on the inside of the plastic cover look like they are affected a bit still but overall it seems like I have fended off the peach leaf curl:

Time will tell if the fruits will mature properly. I sure hope so. I took care of the pollination by hand with a small piece of cotton wool at the end of a bamboo stick:

Oh, and I found this little fellow sleeping behind the plastic at the foot of the tree:

Maybe it’s not warm enough for cockchafers yet…