Rotting and Tomatoes

The sun has been beating down this week and working its magic on the tomatoes as they’re starting to ripen quick. We’re still feeding the plants once a week (even though we are fast running out of liquid feed as the comfrey plants are hardly growing this year) and giving them a good water in the morning. They’re a different shape than what we’re used to but they are great taste wise. We assume they’re the Costoluto Fiorentino variety grown from seed picked up from the seed swap at Glengall Wharf Garden earlier this year. The San Marzano we also obtained there are coming on great too.

And our daily turning of the compost heap and cutting up of the waste as small as possible (not all the time as there’s whole onions and a mouldy orange in there) is starting to pay off. We reckon it’s a combination of those factors plus the open compost bin and the heat as well. This stuff should be able to be used in no time as soon as it all rots down. Sunshine keep doing your job but can we have some rain please?

Sunshine, sunshine do your job

The strange vegetable bed at the bottom of the garden is looking healthy. We’ve red cabbages and tomatoes and a red hot poker but God knows what that’s doing there. The bed usually suffers with a lack of water but we added some organic material from the compost heap at the start of the season, feed the plants there weekly and make sure we get the watering can on it daily. Over the next few nights we may even give it a water in the evening.

Earlier this year we went to that great seed swap at Glengall Wharf Garden in Peckham and got several different varieties of tomatoes. We’re hoping that the toms above are the beefsteak Costoluto Fiorentino from the seed swap and the tomatoes in the raised beds halfway down the garden are the classic plum San Marzano as they look a bit like them.

We really should be more organised with some sort of colour coded notebook and plant labels but sadly we’re not. Let’s see what they turn out like at harvest time.

Coming soon!

Last Sunday we visited the Seed Swap at Glengall Wharf Garden, Peckham SE15 6NF. It was a lovely morning and we picked up a great assortment of seeds including some Texsel Greens (Ethiopian Mustard), some nice tomato varieties and lots of poppy seeds.

We do love a seed swap here at Weeds and just found out about another (above) at Hither Green on Sunday 13th March 2022 from 11am-1pm at Springbank Road Community Garden (thanks to @LewishamGardens on twitter for letting us know!)

Also coming soon is the transmission of The Scented Garden (a nod to flowers and gardeners and also John Peel’s Perfumed Garden show) on Wednesday 9th March 2022 at 1700 utc on 3955 kHz which features at the start of the transmission One Deck Pete‘s “A tribute to council gardeners everywhere” mix. Tune in here.And whilst we’re on the subject of music, here’s a great tune from Islam Chipsy & Eek called El Dynasor. It’s certainly a lively number and one to get those hips a swaying.