Preventing powdery mildew on squashes, pumpkins and other cucurbits

To my great surprise, I have got this far into the season with hardly any powdery mildew on my squash or courgette plants, despite growing them right next to calendulas that promptly came down with mildew. Every year I fight a losing battle against powdery mildew on my cucurbits that involves removing leaves I spot with it before it can spread and spraying them with water mixed with neem oil or water mixed with milk. None of this has ever worked well in the past. My cucurbits have never made it long enough for their leaves to go old and a bit tatty looking without also having powdery mildew. So what did I do differently this year? Two things:

1. I have watered them quite heavily almost every day it hasn't rained.
2. I gave them canes to grow up.

I have, as usual, also removed any leaves where I noticed powdery mildew starting and disposed of them rather than put them on the compost heap (where they would spread their powdery mildew). I can't guarantee this will be successful every time, but this is the first year I've had any success preventing the dreaded mildew at all.
Giving them canes to grow up was quite a hit and miss affair. I didn't really know what I was doing. All I knew was that last year they enjoyed growing up my sweet corn - even though they weren't even supposed to be in the sweet corn's bed. And also, Monty Don gave poles to some of his cucurbits to grow up.
What I initially did was tie tall bamboo canes together in tripods, thinking I would need something really sturdy to cope with the weight of my squashes. Some of my squashes happily latched onto these, but others had to be given a helping hand by tying them on with garden twine.

However, this seems to have been unnecessary, as I later added a couple more canes just stuck in the soil at the front, then the squashes were making their usual attempt to escape the bed and spread all over the grass.

The squash plants have happily latched onto these themselves, just like they latched onto my sweet corn last year. So next year I will simply be sticking bamboo canes upright in the soil all over the cucurbit area. Also, this year I didn't give my courgettes any canes, as the plants looked so compact and bush-like back in early July. Next year I will be giving them canes as well, to see if they're interested. I have really enjoyed having yellow courgettes this year, they're much easier to spot, and this variety has remained tasty and tender to much larger sizes than my previous varieties - which is good, as I never manage to harvest them at the ideal time.

To finish, here are some photos of what else is going on in the garden right now:

Review: tomatoes to grow - Tigerella, Golden Sunrise, Garden Pearl, Marmande, San Marzano 2, Moneymaker and Gardener's Delight

Garden Pearl, Golden Sunrise, Tigerella, San Marzano 2, Marmande

Tigerella, Golden Sunrise and Garden Pearl

I've grown 5 different varieties of tomatoes this year. I got a multi-pack of 6 types of seeds from Mr. Fothergill's, which also included Red Cherry, but I thought two varieties of cherry tomatoes was more than I needed in any one year, so I only planted 5 of the varieties. I also have two tomatoes from previous years to review. This review was edited in late September to take account of the rest of the harvest season.

Here's my review:
Tigerella

This was originally by far my favourite of the tomatoes. In addition to having an attractive tiger stripe (not quite as prominent on the fully ripe fruit as I had hoped, but still a fun feature), these are a good size at about 3-4 cm across and have a tangy, strongly tomato taste. They're a joy to come across in your salad. They've got quite an acidic edge, but I enjoyed that. The plants grew well both in the greenhouse and outside, producing some of my earliest ripe fruit and not having any problems with its fruit or leaves, other than the greenhouse one getting scorched leaves on the hottest day of the year. By early August, both sets of plants had produced ripe tomatoes already and the outdoors one looked set to produce me a decent amount of tomatoes. However this early promise didn't last. By the end of the summer, it turned out to be one of my poorer croppers, both in the greenhouse and outdoors 6/10 outdoors. My outdoor crop may have suffered from being grown in a shadier than ideal area of the garden, so it might be worth me growing them again outdoors. 4/10 in the greenhouse, isn't producing enough tomatoes under my growing conditions in a large pot to be worth it. Might work better in a greenhouse in a cooler climate or straight in the ground in the greenhouse.

Golden sunrise

These were originally my second favourite type of the ones I grew this year, but moved up to become my favourite of this year's crop. Like the Tigerella, they had already produced ripe tomatoes both in the greenhouse and outdoors in early August. Like the Tigerella, they're also tangy with a good strong tomato flavour and a joy to come across in a salad. They make a nice visual change from your standard red tomato. Like the Tigerella, I haven't had that many from the greenhouse, although more than from the Tigerella. Overall, they produced me a small crop in the greenhouse and a larger crop outdoors, but not as good a crop as Moneymaker produced for me in previous years. Also, the later part of the crop was larger than the earlier part, reaching about 5 cm across in September. The level of the crop may have partly been due to being planted in an area of the garden that didn't get enough sun. 7/10 outdoors, will grow again - especially in a sunnier position. 5/10 in the greenhouse. Did not produce many tomatoes in my greenhouse growing conditions.

Marmande

I love the shape of these - all those ribs - and the tomatoes grow like that consistently. I haven't found any plain round ones. They're also lovely large tomatoes, probably around 8 cm wide. What I'm not so keen on is the taste and texture and the fact that by early August only one had ripened so far. I fried it up and served it with some pasta. This did not do it any favours. It was largely flavourless and its texture was floury (in the same way that potatoes can be floury), which was unpleasant. It was not an enjoyable food, which is such a  shame, as it looks so beautiful. They did subsequently ripen and I got a decent sized crop, but I hid their flavour and texture by putting them in soups and sauces. One soup was so flavourless due to these tomatoes that I had to add extra tomato puree to give it some taste. I hope that at the very least they had decent nutritional value. Like the other tomatoes this year, it may have suffered from being in a bed without enough sun and too many snails. 4/10, pretty unlikely to grow again.

Garden pearl

These are heavy-cropping cherry tomatoes that are only happy to grow outdoors. They achieve quite a nice pinkish-red colour and have produced an awful lot of fruit without any sign of blight, despite their insistence on growing low to the ground and despite me not allowing adequate room between plants. The packet alleges that they are sweet. I rarely eat refined sugar, so am highly attuned to natural sweetness. I didn't notice any. All I got was bland, bland, bland. Perhaps "sweet" was code for "neither acidic nor tangy". There was certainly no strong tomato flavour to them. The ones I've grown so far are a waste of space in salad. The only thing I can say in their defence is that I gave them the worst location of all the tomato plants with the least hours of sunlight, so maybe more sunlight would have produced a better flavour. 3/10 will very probably not grow again, except maybe to check my sunlight hypothesis.

San Marzano 2

This is a plum tomato and can be grown either in the greenhouse or outdoors, so I am doing both. By 9 August, the plants both in the greenhouse and outside had produced a fair number of tomatoes, but none of them had ripened yet. When they finally did ripen, the flavour was sweet and a little bit tangy - definitely at the pleasant end of tomato flavours, but the texture was floury, so these were not ideal for salads, but perfectly adequate for soup or stew. In the end, I hardly got any from the greenhouse and most of those got blossom-end rot, probably because I was growing them in containers and watering by hand rather than with an irrigation system. The plants outdoors did produce a decent crop in the end, but I lost a lot of it because I was away for part of September and rains in mid to late September pretty much destroyed the remainder of my tomatoes. 5/10, may one day grow again if craving variety, but am hoping to find better varieties.

Moneymaker

I've been growing Moneymaker tomatoes since I started this garden, but decided to try something new this year. Moneymaker produces nice, standard, red, mid-sized tomatoes that grow easily in the UK whether indoors or out. In fact, they grow so easily in the UK mine had a tendency to self-seed all over the garden. It was also a prolific cropper and I got a huge harvest. The flavour is good and strong. It's been a while since I ate one, so I can't remember precise details, but what I do remember was that I was very happy eating them in salads and they made an excellent chutney. Their only downside is that they lack the excitement of a fancy appearance. 9/10 will almost certainly grow again.

Gardener's delight

These are cherry tomatoes. What I liked about these was that every year I grew them they consistently ripened several days before Moneymaker, so I got an early start on my tomato season. I got a large crop from these and the plants were not trouble. I'm not a fan of cherry tomatoes in general, but as cherry toms go, these are good ones with a strong flavour, reliable ripening and easy to grow, whether in a greenhouse or outdoors. Putting aside the fact I'm not really a fan of cherry tomatoes - although they can be handy for lunch boxes and picnics - 9/10 (and if you're specifically looking for a red-coloured cherry tomato 10/10, I only docked them a point for not having any fancy features like unusual colouring or ribs). I'm not sure if I'll grow them again, but that's entirely due to me not particularly liking cherry tomatoes. If I find myself wanting mini tomatoes again, these will be top of my list.

And finally, here are a few bonus pictures of the garden to show how it's getting on. No powdery mildew on my cucurbits yet, despite the rain. They seem to like being up on sticks.