Tag Archives: Tomato

Vampire freaks and gardening

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A big thanks goes out to Spike from Morschen43 from a very sunny and hot Le Puy-en-Velay, France for keeping us regularly updated about his great garden in the mountains (here). The other day he sent us pictures including some of how his tomatoes are doing.

We were only saying to ourselves the other day that we think the feed we are using (all-purpose feed rather than a specific tomato feed) is making the leaves dark green and were wondering were we feeding them too much nitrogen? We’ve now got a couple of flower trusses starting to show on our plants so they may be okay but looking at Spike’s plants with some large size fruits growing we’re not so sure.

The plants are looking well happy and we love the classic companion planting of Marigolds above (there’s a nice bit about companion planting here). Spike was telling us when he bought the plants they included these varieties below which we’ve never heard of before and they sound well interesting:

The Beef Heart “A heritage variety with a most unusual heart shape fruit. Beefsteak type with excellent flavour and few seeds. Ripens to deep red.”
www.mammothonion.co.uk

Black Crimea “An old, heirloom variety AKA ‘Black Krim’, this sweet and spicy beefsteak tomato has a wonderful aroma and distinctive dark reddish-brown skin ideal for soups, slicing and sauces. Named after the peninsula, ‘Black Crimea’ each olive-shouldered fruit can weigh in at 350g each!”
www.rhsplants.co.uk

Andean horned “Tomato Bellandine, sometimes nicknamed Horn of the Andes, is an indeterminate cordon variety producing long, elegant plum-shaped fruits. Each tomato typically weighs 180 – 230 g and measures up to 18 cm long. The flesh is firm, very fleshy, and almost seedless, delivering an excellent sweet flavour with a rich aroma.”
www.simplyseed.co.uk

Alongside the pictures of the tomatoes he sent us a picture (below) of the vine growing across the house which they got off a neighbour of his grand parents in Troyes (Capital of the Champagne region). Great stuff Spike. Do keep updating us as we appreciate it here!

If you love a bit of rock/punk and a bit of reggae, ska, dub, metal, hard rock, tune into Spike’s Vampirefreaks radio show here. The shows are archived here.

Tomato fruit puller. Puller, puller

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Whilst researching a future post, we found this great variety of tomato from Seed Spring Seeds (website here).

As it says in the blurb on the site:
A Romanian tomato producing large, roughly heart-shaped fruit that weigh an average of 365g and measure about 8.5cm in diameter. Captain Beefheart’s big taste is combined with a juicy flesh, tender skin and few seeds, making it one of the best large-fruited tomatoes you are likely to encounter. The plants are good growers and will produce fruit well into the autumn.

A pepper called Frank Zappa anyone?

The above is a fantastic Beefheart tune as played on the excellent Andrew Weatherall – Live at Antenna Studios mixtape here.

Closer to home AKA fish food, courgettes and tomatoes

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Things are looking great in the garden, the late sown Courgette/Zucchini plants are flowering and here’s one of them with a little fruit showing on the left hand side (above). In the picture is also some sort of wild geranium/pelargonium that came out of a wild flower seed mix we flung around the area beside it.

There are a couple of fruits starting to ripen on the very early sown tomato (above) we put in a broken food recycling bin that is up near the house. And (below) an ebay purchase (of £11) of fish food for the goldfish in the pond (50p for size comparison). Reckon this’ll last until the end of the decade! Does fish food have a “use by” date? Another silly question put to you by Weeds up to me knees.

Have a good gardening week and “may the comfrey liquid, bees and weather by with you” as they say on GQT.

Out with the bubble wrap, out with the bubble wrap!

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Sometimes it’s small things that make you think. We were just reading the “What to do in the garden in May” piece on Penny GoLightly’s excellent blog here. She mentioned “The month has started with a mini heatwave, but I’m not rushing to plant out most of my seedlings too soon” and we have a bit of a realisation and checked the weather forecast for SE23 and thought “Ahh, she has a point”.

Its looks likes there’s going to be a little bit of a change in temperature this weekend to say the least. From those glorious summer vibes to a humbling 13°C tomorrow. Funny enough we just found a pic (above) from May 17th 2020, look at those sophisticated forms of frost protection and thats in mid-May!

To be honest we did get a bit carried away and put a couple (and more to be honest) of tomato plants out and yes there are some chillies seedlings that have been repotted and left out overnight. We’ve even dismantled a cold frame (aka took the bricks off holding down the polythene and folded up said polythene and chucked it in the bin). Looks like all of that will have to change this evening, alongside the flip flops and shorts going back into the wardrobe.

We’ll be bringing the chillies in tonight just to be on the safe side as it may drop to 4° C and we have a massive roll of bubble wrap purchased initially for selling stuff on eBay that will come in very handy.

We feel a bit sorry for the bloke on Facebook the other week who put out all his 30 odd tomato plants saying there won’t be a frost. He may be alright, but it does seem a bit nippy in the evenings next week. Good luck and may the (frost) protection be with you and enjoy those rays of sun rays today as you may have to put the jumper back on tomorrow.

Are you sure it was sunny here this weekend?

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Where has that sun gone to, the one that appeared here the weekend and the same one that contributed to Sunday being 17°C? You will laugh, as over the weekend we even put some plants out in the back garden to harden off. It’s only March and we’re thinking about hardening off plants, we must be crazy. The above pic is a of self-seeded tomato in front of some suncream, after sun and insect repellent, a taste of things to come you reckon?

Do remember that frost prediction site here as that will come in handy if you’ve got that “we’ll get those seeds/plants in early” feeling like us. It’s nearly there but do wait a little before sticking those plants out. Have you seen the forecast for this week?

Starting them early my friend

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It’s still only January but we’ve started some seeds already. Last year everything seemed to go wrong with the seed sowing as they germinated and then just stalled for a good few weeks and then died. We have no idea what it was, was it to do with the cheap compost we got at a supermarket? Was it those damn aphids who feasted on the basil plants on the kitchen windowsill later in the season? Was it some sort of delayed damping off?

 

Who knows but we weren’t best pleased as the batch contained some rare chilli and some choice tomato varieties. We ended up buying some chilli plants and a nice bushy tomato plant from B&Q in the end which all done well but it’s not the same.

We’ve now wiped the slate clean and put the memory of last year’s failings out of the way and started afresh with some proper seed and cutting compost in pots in a heated propagator we received as a present a few year ago (cheers Maz and Marc!)

Seeds sown this week: mint, dill, basil, chives, parsley, san marzano tomato, cerise tomato, chilli habanero, chilli Jalapino (the last 3 out of packs that say sow by 12.2023) and some seeds we dried off our chilli apache plant last year. We also sowed some catmint even though we were warned years ago that “you’ll have every cat in the neighbourhood in your back garden”.

In a few weeks every windowsill will be full with pots on saucers, jam jars and plastic freezer bags on top of plant pots as cheap alternative to greenhouses.

 

Anyone know any good tips for stopping those aphids? Someone the other week mentioned neem oil and we’ve just looked online and may try it. Anyone ever used it? Any tips to one deck pete at Gee mail dot com please.

What a difference four days make

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It doesn’t take long, just a few days of dryness to ruin what you have in your garden. Our good friend Gerry Hectic came back the other week from Gilles Peterson‘s We Out Here festival and his tomato/strawberry experiment in one of those strawberry pots was looking the worse for wear. It is totally sad to see the before (above) and after (below).

Please tell us there’s a happy ending Gerry!

And to change up the vibes on this sad event here’s a wonderful number from Cyril Diaz Et Son Orchestre with Feeling Happy. May this tune lift spirits and sad dry plants everywhere.

 

Ball Hill calling to the faraway towns

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We took a trip to Coventry the other weekend and popped into the Coventry Music Museum/Two Tone Village in Ball Hill Village. We spotted the lesser spotted Ded Yampy fanzine wedged between two King singles (one of them was even signed!)

They don’t half love their tomatoes up there as at the Music Museum we spotted a couple of plants outside, we would have loved it even more if the variety was called two tone or something like that. They looked healthy enough as well.

Also walking up Albany Road later on almost opposite Jerry Dammer’s old flat we spotted a table of tomato plants with “Free. Please help yourselves!” We do like a sign saying that, did they mean we could take the table thing as well we wonder?

And the tune for tonight is sadly not from Coventry but from Iceland from Leik with Toy center at night and a lovely little tune it is too. One going out to our Coventry and Birmingham friends around this gardening globe of ours.

Our friends in Kyiv

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A big thanks as always to our good friend Wlad (US7IGN) in Kyiv for sending us some more excellent pictures. The first is his Dill seedlings (above) that look like they’re doing very well.

Wlad also wrote of the other plants he started off as well “The garlic also remained small for a long time, but then simply dried out” and his potato plant is growing but seems to have stood still for a while (pics above).

It’s funny as we’re having problems on some of the seedlings on our windowsill too, we’ve got some chilli and tomato seedlings and they are not doing much else after growing their seed leaves and one set of a normal leaf. There looks like there’s some sort of greenfly about but they don’t seem to be bothering any of the other sunflower seedlings or sweet peas. Any ideas?

As for his Wlad’s good mate Sergiy (UT3UFD) his banana is doing very well! It looks well healthy and so does his date palm (above). Great stuff!

We always think of Sergiy’s plant when we pass the banana plant that is in a front garden in SE23. We have no idea if bananas are supposed to survive the british weather but this one seems to! Cheers again to Wlad and Sergiy for the pics and we look forward to seeing more.

Spring is here (or just around the corner)

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Cheers for Debby H for getting in touch with us today. She sent us a pic of daffodils in full bloom in a council maintained bed near her home in North London (above) and they look great!

Debby has recently started off some tomato and cosmos seeds. The cosmos seeds were straight off the flower heads of the plants they grew last year. After being left in a box all winter they were sown a couple of days ago. As she said: “We just scattered the whole dead heads on earth/compost and covered them over. We didn’t bother to try to separate out the seeds first. Within two days the little things were germinating madly!”  (Photo above). That is crazy! The seeds must have had exactly the right conditions that they loved as two days is good going for germination.

Debby told us a great tip that she used with the cosmos seedlings (pic above): “I re-planted some of them in an egg box as they were growing too densely. The idea Is that, when they are ready to go outside, I will cut the egg box into individual sections, then plant each section separately. As the egg box is made of cardboard it should bio-degrade so I won’t need to remove the seedlings from the box partitions before planting them.” That is a top idea, we have been using some biodegradable pots from B&Q but this idea is better. What we usually do with our egg boxes is chuck them on the compost heap but we reckon we’ll be putting seeds in them!

Cheers Debby, thanks again and look forward for more pics soon!