Spiders and powdery mildew

Arghh....i hate spiders, i know they do wonders for your garden but i draw the line at the house...a spider comes into my house and it dies. End of story. Yesterday i found a massive (read not tiny) red back in my toilet!! I fear these just a bit more than huntsmen. So i put a glass over it and left it until my partner Adam came home :) well he proptly filled the cup with hot water and dishwashing liqued :) it didnt like that very much! Despite being dead now it is also squeaky clean!

Back to the garden, some of my heirloom tomatoes are dropping blossoms and their bottom leaves are yellowing...grr...so ill tell you what it means. The yellow leaves at the bottom of the plant mean a nitrogen deficiency. If you are growing tomatoes in pots like i am you will be using potting mix, while being great and all the soil does tend to be lacking in some basic things, nitrogen being one of them. That is why you are recommended to give you tomatoes a tomato feed every week. Now my plants are not wholly organic but i do try to limit the amount of crap i put on them. To almost nothing if i can. So to raise the nitrogen level in the soil i have given them a feed from my worm farm :) both the juice and the soil.

With the dropping blossoms, it is most likely a calcium deficiency, now the most effective way to rectify that is by adding crushed egg shells to the soil, however i am all out of egg shells, sooo a more alterative method is to water with a cup of milk. :) will let you know how it goes

Oh and powdery milkdew is like a white powder that sits ontop of the leaves of things like tomatoes, pumpkins, zuccini etc. The best organic way to get rid of it (its been affecting my tomatoes to!) it to spray it with a solution made up of 1 part milk to 9 parts water. Once a week.

Other than that my garden is doing well, the raspberry is flowering, the runner beans have taken off and the apple trees have lots of new shoots. I counted over 20 tomatoes growing on my now 7 foots high cherry tomato plant!

That will do for today :)