Tag Archives: Tomatoes

Sunshine, sunshine do your job

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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.

There’s more on the way!

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A big thanks to our good gardening mate Gerry Hectic for sending us pictures of the story so far in his garden. Loving the runner beans in the pot with a trolley from Aldi at the bottom so it can be moved around to catch the maximum of sunlight. Our other good friend Phil Harmony in Berlin used to also use that idea on his balcony for his veg growing. As The Merton Parkas used to sing “You need wheels”.

The peas and tomatoes look great too! Just water them daily and add a weekly feed, all will hopefully be grand! More pics of your progress in a few weeks please Gerry!

They’re on their way!

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Now some of the flowers have dropped off the tomato plants we’ve been giving them and other fruiting plants a weekly feed of comfrey liquid. We’re also been giving the tomatoes some support with canes and garden wire as in a few week’s time some of the fruit will get heavy.

We’ve been using the home-made feed sparingly as we haven’t been getting that many comfrey leaves to make the liquid out of. We usually try and pass the feed on as it’s brilliant stuff but up until now have just about enough for ourselves. Fingers crossed we get a splurge of comfrey leaf growth soon.

The zucchini/courgette we planted in a in a pot is starting to flower now too and the climbing beans plants we got from Shannon’s are setting fruit on one of the three runner bean cane tripods we put in. As for the other two tripods, one went for a burton through underwater and the other one has been overun with blackfly. It’s strange as there’re only a couple of feet apart from each other.

So keep on with the watering through this dry spell and get some plant feed to your vegetables to get the best out of the plants cropping wise.

And while we’re on beanpoles here something brilliant bean support-wise from a few years ago from Vic Godard from The Subway Sect’s Dad’s garden. It’s a 16 caner with a nice tying system at the top and it really looks the part!

Are we there yet?

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We’ve been away for a few days to sunny Sudbury where the only stress was making sure a couple of cats, the garden birds and the guest ducks were fed and cat treats administered. It was nice to get away for a break after the last couple of years of the on and off madness of lockdown.

When we returned, the garden at home had certainly grown even after 5 days. The spuds we put in early (in February under cover here) were looking well happy and flowering like anything and so was the courgette seedling we put in a big pot (above). One tip, don’t even consider consuming the fruits that may appear on the potato plant after flowering as you’ll certainly keel over. This is how one website put it “…if you are feeling adventurous, you could try tasting a ripe berry, but don’t swallow it unless your health insurance is paid up.” We always knock them off if we see them growing just to be on the safe side.

Now it’s back to that age old “When do we pull the spuds up?” conundrum. It’s all confusing, as far as we can remember these were Golden Wonder maincrop potatoes which you supposed harvest in August/September, but we put them in earlier than they should have been so that’ll make a difference won’t it? If you want to find out more, there’s a good article about the various potato types explained on the Gardener’s World website here.

We usually wait until the flowers and foliage have well died down before we go in with a fork (remembering what Joe Maiden used to say about going in a few times so nothing is left in the ground. “Volunteer” potatoes can muck up an OCD laid out vegetable bed the year after if not) but there’s nothing stopping the impatient digging around in the compost earlier seeing if there’s anything small to harvest. If you’ve got raised beds filled with general purpose compost it shouldn’t take much effort get in there with a trowel and be like a careful archaeologist. If there’s nothing of a decent size just cover them back up and let them get on with it. We’ve read online some people enjoy spuds when they’re marble sized, each to their own we say.

Another thing we actually got around to doing was “side shooting” our tomato plants. This is simply taking out the side shoots that appear between the leaf joint (making sure they’re not the fruit bearing trusses that grow from the stem not on the junction between leaf and stem). The whole idea of doing this, is the plant will put all of its energy into making the fruit rather than into making leaves. If you have a butchers at this video below though the great Bob Flowerdew suggests growing Tomatoes on a couple of main stems. We love the bit that starts at 2.25 “I thought you were a good gardener?”

But the big question here isn’t if he’s a good gardener or not, it’s is he a reggae lover or a Kraftwerk fan or both, we need to know! If anybody knows please tell us.

There’s a tomato in my kitchen (window) what am I gonna do?

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Big shout to our gardening friend Gerry Hectic who’s stripped his outdoor tomato plants and brought the fruits in on the kitchen windowsill. We love the jar idea!

We’ve got some on ours too and chucked a couple away this morning as they looked like they were going brownish and we didn’t want them to muck up the other tomatoes.

Also cheers to another gardening/music friend, from across the pond this time Justin Patrick Moore who has acquired some Austrian winter pea seeds. We’ve never heard of them before and they sound good.

We’ve read “The greens taste like sweet sugar snap peas, but have the texture of lettuce” and they’re are also grown as a “Cover Crop” that’s one not for harvest but to cover the soil over the winter months to stop erosion and in the case of this plant to add nitrogen to the soil. May be a good idea to grow some either to eat or improve you garden! More on them here. Cheers to Gerry and Justin for the pics and info.

Frosts by the end of the week?

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Well it’s coming to the end of the gardening season so it’s been a time for tidying up. The best job we did this year has to be relining that pond. It was a pain at the time but once it was done there was no turning back. The fish and the plants seemed happier and we’ve even had frogs taking part in a romantic evening swim and lots of tiny frogs migrating out of the pond to the rugged area around it. That’s all got to be good!

We’ve taken the tomato plants out of the raised beds and stuck in some garlic and onions (and an old stick of celery to see if it will grow) and we’ve a lot of unripened toms sitting on the kitchen windowsill our favourite method of ripening the green fruit. We could have gone for the banana method but we’ve no bananas. Here’s a couple of ripening tricks here and how they work.

We’ve also put some metal netting/grid type things on the top of the surface to stop the pests. The most recent ones to the garden are the pigeons as we caught them red handed at the brussel sprouts tops earlier. And we thought it was the slugs! We really have to think about some netting as we wonder was it them at the cardoons as well?

And we tidied up the bed at the side, took out the corn plants that had been pilfered by rogue squirrels and now working our way down to the sunflowers. We may actually keep the stalks of the big ones and use them for support for the sweet peas or beans or something.

So if you can get some time in now for a tidy up it will save you having to do so when the weather gets colder/wetter. Oh yes, we heard on the countryfile weather forecast on Sunday there could be a frost towards the end of the week so keep them peeled. Better safe than sorry!

Odds and ends

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There won’t be many words in this post just mainly pictures from the garden earlier. The first (below) is the result of the random throwing around of seed when receiving them from ebay (This is possibly from a wild flower mix). With the flowers we very rarely mark out seed drills and stick down plant labels, it’s straight out of the bag and onto the bed.

And the second is a rather strange and wonderful freshly picked tomato. It seems a shame to eat it!

And the third is the super tall Sunfower looking down on us ready to flower. This one next to the garage is nearly 10 foot. Bonkers.

And on in the background whilst we were writing this post was this week’s Rhythm Doctor’s Waiting Room on IDA Radio Tallinn (every Monday from 8-11 UK time and archived here). There’s lots of musical goodness on the show as udsual and at the start some works from one Vladimir Tarasov teased in and out of other downtempo gear. A idea “stick it on the stereo” midweek summer evening listen.

Forest Hill in the spring time

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Well it’s the first day of spring today but it didn’t really feel like it weatherwise. We spent a couple of hours in the garden as the neighbours have put up a new fence so we cleared the bed on the side so we can actually see what plants are called for this year. We need a few shrubs so we’ll be researching them over the next few weeks.

There’s seeds galore on the kitchen windowsill including two types of tomatoes and sweet peas, cut and come again lettuce, chillies and various herbs. It’s all about being prepared as the growing season is going to come around sooner than you think!

There was a load of clearing up going on down the bottom end of the garden too, lots of ivy to be cut back and we found a nice pile of very dry clippings from months ago. So to end a good couple of hours in the garden we christened our fairly newly acquired incinerator, cheers Marc! It’s been a while since we’ve had a fire and we’ve forgotten how nice it is to sit around a burning bright dustbin feeling the warmth. Hands up who loves a garden incinerator!

Non-action and cherry tomatoes

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We love growing tomatoes here as you know and we usually strictly adhere to staking the plants up with wire ties to a bamboo cane, taking out any sideshoots and of course stopping the plants (by nipping out the top of the plant) after 4 or 5 trusses.

Well we usually do, but we had a self-seeded tomato plant at the bottom of the garden and we just left it to it’s own devices. It’s gone absolutely mad, it’s swamped out any weeds growing in the small corner bed it’s in, spilled out onto the path and if you look closely there’s a few cherry toms forming. Ain’t it great what happens when you stay out of the way!
#Wuweiandcherrytomatoes

Every kind of weather to make what August’s about, yeah

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Well it’s been a weird few days, we’ve had a welcome bit of rain, then the sun returned back to “classic lockdown mode” and earlier today it was back to greyness. We’re confused, what month is it again? Well the sunflower’s out, it may not be of the giant variety but it’s great in that Fibonacci sequence style!

We did manage to do some gardening over the last few days. We dried out some of our broad beans earlier this year and we’ve stuck three small rows of them at the bottom of the garden. We don’t know if they’ll sprout but we gave it a go!

A few years ago we bought a dwarf blackberry/bramble bush and didn’t really have much luck with it and even moved it around a bit which probably don’t help matters. The last year or so we’ve left it in its present position and now it’s starting to fruit. There isn’t much there but a few blackberries are better than none!

In front of that dwarf bramble are the raised beds that we put together around the start of lockdown. In them next to the tomatoes and spuds there’s some pepper plants with fruit on them. They are out of the way and water is of the sparse variety unless we remember. We’ve given them some regular doses of comfrey liquid and a few of peppers on the plants are starting to get a little larger.

Just next to those peppers out of view is a cabbage that has been beheaded by them pesky pigeons. You win some you lose some. Well at least we’ll be having some nicer weather (supposedly) this weekend.

A big shout to Gerry Hectic for alerting us to this great track below from King Knut called “Spellbound”. Very Dub Disco band for the love of money, dubbed out weirdness and old cassettes of the Rhythm Doctor on Fantasy FM in the early 90’s. It’s a nice tune!