crops

It’s raining tomatoes! (Amen)

Look at these beauties! They’re gorgeous, aren’t they? Whether it’s fresh tomatoes in salad, or a handful of tomatoes in boeuf bourguignon (as cooked by other half tonight… he does a very tasty BB), or in chilli con carne or spaghetti bolognaise… they’re fantastic. I will be sorry when they finally come to an end, I really will. Roll on next year though. Am going to push the boat out next year, tomato-wise, and grow Gardener’s Delight, Tumbling Tom and some “heirloom” varieties. I’m intrigued by a variety called Brandywine which is supposedly grown by the Amish in the USA and bears large, late, pinkish-coloured fruit. Oh, and I’d like to try a golden and/or black variety as well. I’d better stop now ‘cos I’m starting to drool LOL. BTW, that wrinkly brown object in the middle is one of the last of the figs off our fig tree. They’ve been really tasty too, although I can take no credit as the tree was planted by our landlords (although I’m sure the tree’s proximity to our compost bin can’t be doing any harm).

Carrots: still hanging in there

Two months ago I planted some carrots (Autumn King) in a deep bucket filled with spent compost. They came up OK, but some insect or slug (identity unknown) finds the leaves to be delicious, so I’ve had to resort to some extreme measures to protect them. Namely, an upturned hanging basket – minus the hanging chain thingies – covered with a fine net curtain. As it says in the title, the carrots are still hanging in there although I have no idea if I’ll actually end up with any actual carrots worthy of the name. On the plus side, I am in tomato heaven at the moment. Last night I made pasta sauce for the two of us, entirely out of home-grown tomatoes plus a squirt of tomato puree. Fingers crossed, we will be eating home-grown toms until the end of the month. Almost makes up for the courgettes (lousy) and the runner beans (less so, but still not exactly stellar).

Staking tomatoes – Empress Felicity style

The Gardener’s Delight tomatoes in our back garden are going great guns but they’ve well and truly outgrown the stakes that I’d orignally used. So they were flopping about all over the place, and a couple of stems had actually broken or were threatening to break. I did start by putting in longer stakes (of a length you’d normally use for building a runner bean tepee), but then I thought, “Hold on, what about tying the tomatoes to the washing line?” So that’s exactly what I did, using some lengths of garden twine! There’s still enough room for a few T-shirts though, which is good. Speaking of tomatoes, we had a friend come and see us for lunch this weekend. It was lovely being able to give her a punnet of home-grown tomatoes. Such is the glue that binds society together, I think. Speaking of tomatoes, I had the first ripe Tumbling Tom today. It tasted gorgeous, which is just as well considering how expensive the seeds were!

Gardeners delight!

I love this time of year. It’s when all your efforts over the previous six months come to fruition – literally. The first of our Gardeners Delight tomatoes are ripening off; when they start to go orange, I just pick them (leaving the calyx on if possible) and shove them on a little temporary wooden shelf I’ve stuck on our kitchen windowsill. Well, it’s more of a sort of platform, consisting of a bit of tongue & groove propped up with some rectangular marble trophies that the other half and I once won for our quizzing efforts. The extra three inches of elevation gives the tomatoes that much more sunlight. I’ve heard that placing a banana or two with the tomatoes speeds up the ripening process, but have never tried it.

On an almost unrelated note (and nothing to do with container gardening at all really), I went foraging for blackberries at the weekend and picked about five pounds of them! They were gorgeous: the best ever. Made a massive blackberry crumble and stuck the rest in the freezer. I reached the blackberries just in time – a week later and most of them would have been past the point of being edible. Just as well I didn’t listen to the Daily Mail’s article about blackberries being late this year!

From colanders to containers: update

In a post a few weeks back, I extolled the virtue of using old colanders as hanging baskets for my Tumbling Tom tomato plants. The colander I’m using is about 9 inches in diameter and not particularly deep, which is probably the reason for the slight yellowing around the edge of the leaves. The Tumbling Toms I’ve been growing in bigger, deeper baskets are all doing better, despite the fact that I’ve planted more than one to a basket. You live and learn! On the subject of tomatoes, the first of the Gardener’s Delights are ripening. And I’m starting to get decent-looking courgettes again, after a lull of several weeks. My runner bean leaves are still looking rather starved (see my post of 25th July), so I’ve invested £6.99 in some Miracle-Gro slow release granules, which – from the list of ingredients on the jar – look as though they contain every trace element/nutrient known to man!

Funny tomato

I picked this tomato at the weekend, sliced it and fried it to go with sausage and egg. (Fried green tomatoes are very tasty actually, and are a great way to use up the unripe fruit if you find that you have too many tomatoes.) Anyone else out there ever grow tomatoes with a weird sticky-out bit like this one? And why does it happen at all, I wonder?

My salad leaves are bolting

I suppose it had to happen eventually, but those nice salad leaves I referred to in an earlier post have finally decided to bolt; they’re developing stems and the leaves are going from translucent and tender to opaque and bitter. But considering that I’ve had a steady supply of tender, tasty leaves for about 50 lunches over the last three months, I can’t really complain. I estimate I must have saved about £50 compared with what I would have paid if I’d bought bags of salad from the shops – not bad for a 39p packet of seeds! I still have some rocket out in the front garden, plus spring onions, baby chard, chives, sorrel and (just coming up and protected from snails by an old net curtain) mizuna.

What’s happening to the leaves on my runner beans?

OK, here’s a question for all you expert gardeners out there: from the picture, what is up with my runner beans? As you can see, the leaves are discoloured and patchy-looking. I’m assuming it’s some sort of mineral deficiency (nitrogen? phosphorus?) but would appreciate a bit of advice. If it’s relevant, the bean variety is good old Scarlet Emperor. On a completely unrelated note, I am plagued with blackfly at the moment. They started by attacking the small comfrey patch in the back garden, and are now spreading to my tomatoes. Looks as though I’ll be out with the spray gun full of soapy water tomorrow morning. The good news: I have two respectable-looking courgettes! Yay! Go me!

Another thing to do with sorrel

I did some baked cod for dinner tonight, which involved wrapping a couple of large cod fillets in foil with a couple of knobs of butter and some tiny basil leaves (the basil is grown indoors on our windowsill). Normally I’d add a squeeze of lemon juice but we didn’t have any lemon, so I washed a few fresh sorrel leaves and used those instead. It was fab – better than lemon actually, because it wasn’t so acidic but it still managed to give a citrus-like tang to the fish.

I baked the fish for 20 minutes at gas mark 7 which was perhaps a few minutes too long – you will probably find that 15 minutes is enough.

Sorrel: a much neglected herb

One of my successes this year has been the sorrel I’ve grown in an old polystyrene fish box given to me by a neighbour. I half filled it with home-made compost, and planted some sorrel seeds (bought on eBay) in early May, with a second sowing in June; that’s why most of the plants on the right are smaller! The leaves of sorrel (Latin name Rumex acetosa) have a lemony flavour, which apparently is down to the fact that they contain oxalic acid. You don’t want to eat too much sorrel in one go, partly because of the aforementioned oxalic acid which is toxic in large quantities, and partly because of the tart flavour. But if you mix it with rocket, oak leaf lettuce, spring onion etc., then it does away with the need for lemon juice or vinegar in your salad dressing. In fact, if you cut a fresh clove of garlic in half and rub it on the inside of a serving dish (squeezing all the while to get as much garlic juice out as possible), bung your salad leaves in and drizzle with good quality olive oil, then you’ve got a really simple yet tasty salad. Yesterday for lunch I did just that, and added some cold roast beef and Yorkshire pudding!