What rot

GAH!!!!!

Our onions have got white rot. Which means, that most of them are completely inedible.

Katy’s allotment guru work colleague did a blind diagnosis based on her description of the problem and we think he’s right.

Dead roots? Loose in the soil? A rotten bottom? Yup, that’ll be white rot. It’s a fungal disease. My toes always curl at the very mention of any words beginning with ‘fung’, but I'll put aside my revulsion to share my new knowledge with you.

I’ve since looked it up on the Royal Horticultural Society website and it all seems to tally. The word that worries me is ‘contamination’. Apparently, the fact that our onions have got rotten bottoms means that our soil is contaminated with something called Sclerotica and it can live for at least eight years below the surface. So, planting any onions in there in the near future would be to commit onion murder.

Hopefully, the whole plot isn’t affected, but there’s only one way to find out. We’ll plant some more next year and see how they fare. The RHS say that there isn’t a way to treat the soil to get rid of the disease, so we’ll give have to give it time. Lots of it.