Plants bolt in warm weather (From Blackpool Citizen)

Plants bolt in warm weather

9:43am Friday 8th June 2007

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TWO of my plants have bolted this week - and I don't mean they've legged it over the garden fence.

Apparently, plants bolt when warm weather or some other trigger causes them to begin to flower and set seed before they have produced a harvestable crop.

It usually happens when plants have been exposed to cold weather early on in their life followed by a burst of hot weather.

This triggers the plant to procreate by sending up thin shoots which flower. The taste becomes bitter and although edible most people don't like to eat them.

This happened in my garden. Perhaps I planted them a tad too early and the subsequent warm weather prompted them into early growth.

Plants commonly affected by bolting are lettuce and the brassica like broccoli and cabbage. It happened to one of my broccoli plants and to rocket in the salad leaves bed.

The broccoli is spindly and has produced small but pretty yellow flowers, while the other broccoli plants surrounding it have spread wide at the base, are leafy and green and show no signs of producing the traditional-looking, tightly packed broccoli head, so I assume they are OK.

The rocket plant also has a very thin stalk which has produced white flowers and not much greenery. Sadly, I think both plants are lost to the dining table.

I will remove them and replace with other plants as I have a few left over from when we bought too many plug plants.

The rest of the garden is doing fine, although one or two plants, especially among the cabbages have some leaf discolouration.

On the underside of one cabbage leaf we found some kind of fungal or larval presence. The patch, around a square inch, was a bright orange cluster, so the leaf was removed and put in the bin.

The potatoes in both barrels are coming along fine and I keep building up the soil around the roots, as the books say, and I'm hopeful of a good crop.

I have planted some traditional long-rooted carrots in the plastic bin, with leeks in the second bin, so I am hopeful the carrots will escape being attacked by the dreaded carrot fly, which apparently doesn't fly above 30cms.

The runner beans are sending shoots up like no-one's business - they seem to be really thriving and I hope they continue in this fashion.

As I have said previously the lettuce bed, apart from the bolting rocket plant, is looking better every day. We have taken lots of leaves for salads in recent days but it doesn't seem to noticeably reduce the amount of leaves.

Other vegetable growers I have spoken to seem to be having big problems with slugs - a problem which I appear to have escaped.

I put that down to a mixture of raised plastic beds surrounded by pea gravel, which I assume slugs don't like to cross. Other gardeners have surrounded their plants with gravel or crushed eggs shells, which deters the slimy beasts.

My wife has also noticed tiny green shoots, almost like clover, appearing in all of the beds, which we will have to tackle this week.

We suppose these must be airborne weeds as the mixture of compost, vermiculite and peat moss was clean when we mixed them in the beds.

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