jesl

[jesl]

Hi all,
I'm new to this site and to the whole allotment thing. This year, my first, has been pretty good overall but with the odd disaster. Does anyone know what I did wrong with growing peppers and aubergines in quadgrows (I did include the feeders). Firstly I did grow them outside and they started off fine but then later in the season they just stopped taking up water from the reservoir. I did get some fruits but not as good as I thought and not really good enough. I wonder whether I should have watered from the top and only added water to the reservoir when they were searching for water. Does anyone have any advice. ? Thanks

[burnie]

Welcome jesl, it would help if we knew roughly where your allotment is as climate changes in different areas can have an effect, for example I garden in NE Scotland, very different to southern UK areas.

[Plot70]

I took on a plot at the end of last year.
I got the squashes to do very well.
Runner beans were fine and have a few more to come before the frost gets them.
Tomatoes did as well as they could after the support structure collapsed.
Kolrabi and kale did well. other things struggled due to the heavy clay not having been worked enough.
I have got a mass of pickled couch grass roots to put on for next year.
More manure when the local riding school gets a tractor driver for a few days.
Peppers and tomatoes are better under glass and grow fine in a mixture of clay and horse manure.

[Penellype]

Hi Jesl, welcome to the vine. It is hard to be specific, as I don't know where you are, but in general in the UK this year the weather has been unusual. April in particular was exceptionally warm and May was the sunniest May on record and also very warm. June was also warm, but July was cooler than average, and although August ended up a warm month overall, the last week was very cool indeed. The whole summer was characterised by wild swings in temperature from hot to cold, so the figures for the 3 summer months as a whole were misleading.

Peppers and aubergines are mediterranean plants which like warmth and the warm spring would explain why they grew well at first. However, like my outdoor tomatoes, which are about a month late ripening this year, they will not have liked the colder periods at all and this would have coincided with when they were growing and trying to ripen their fruit. Growing these crops in the UK, particularly outside, is always borderline, particularly away from the south, and success is always subject to the weather. Some varieties may be slightly better than others, so look for one that is billed as an outdoor variety - but I find this can be optimistic and it really is better to grow these plants under cover if you can.

With regard to the quadgrow, it is best to water and feed into the reservoir. The top of the compost may look dry, but that is normal, and providing you have the wicks correctly in place the plants should be fine for water and feed.