Posts Tagged ‘tomatoes’

Last of the tomatoes

I picked about three pounds of green tomatoes today – they’re hardly going to ripen off outside in the middle of October and in any case my OH has offered to make chutney out of them! (I would have been foolish to turn this offer down, because I didn’t fancy making the chutney myself as it would have involved spending several hours in a very steamy, vinegary-smelling kitchen.) Plus my tomato plants are going brown and wilty looking (I believe the technical term is “dying” LOL), and many of the remaining tomatoes are acquiring a frostbitten, bruised look – see the bottom pic in this post.

I wasn’t sure whether I should compost my dying/dead tomato plants, because there’s always the risk that I could pass on disease to next year’s crop. Given that I will almost certainly be growing next year’s tomatoes in pure home-made compost, I have decided to err on the side of caution and throw the old plants away. I’d be keen to hear any thoughts from other tomato growers out there though.

Still going strong!

On the tomato front, that is. We must have made about five or six pasta/chilli con carne dishes solely out of fresh, home-grown tomatoes (with a dash of tomato puree for good measure). As I write this on October 2nd, the tomatoes have definitely “peaked”, but we’ll still be eating fresh ones for the next couple of weeks, I think.

At this time it’s a good idea to review what went well in the garden and what didn’t. So here goes:

Tomatoes: huge success
Salad leaves (rocket, spicy leaf mix, oak leaf lettuce mix, sorrel): big success
Chard: Not bad
Rhubarb: success. It was definitely worth planting some in a corner of our raised bed, which doesn’t get much light and wouldn’t have supported much else
Spring onions: success. This is another crop (like salad leaves and tomatoes) which is well worth it, even if you don’t have much space. You can pick them a couple at a time, rather than buying a bunch from the shops and throwing half away
Runner beans: got some nice ones, but on the whole a huge disappointment
Carrots: epic fail – an unidentified pest ate all the leaves.
Courgettes: almost complete fail, although we did get a few small ones
Herbs (mint, chives, thyme, sage etc.): success.

Still picking plenty of salad leaves even now, and am looking forward to next year!

Me and carrots don’t go :(

I thought I was being clever when I improvised a cover for my container of carrots, which consisted of an upturned empty hanging basket covered with fine net curtain. However, whatever it was that had nobbled my carrots before must have found a way inside, because the leaves have been completely eaten. Not just nibbled a bit, eaten. I just have to face up to the fact that I don’t have orange fingers (:sigh:).

On the upside, the tomatoes keep on coming. If there are some tomatoes at the tail end of our crop that refuse to ripen, a neighbour of ours has offered to take them off our hands and make green tomato chutney.

Runner beans are nearly over – they’ve been a real disappointment. The beans themselves have been gorgeous, but there just haven’t been as many of them as last year.

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).

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?

From colanders to containers

I’m quite proud of my ingenuity on this one. Basically, I’m very mean when it comes to spending actual money on my garden. So rather than shell out £££ on some hanging baskets to plant my Tumbling Tom cherry tomato plants, I bought a couple of old colanders at a local church jumble sale. This one is suspended from a metal bracket via the handle from a bucket, and held in place with a wire coat hanger. It doesn’t exactly look elegant, but at least it’s nice and secure. The white bits you can see in the photo are a piece of old net curtain, which has been used to line the colander and prevent the compost from coming out through the holes. Today I could just see some tiny flower buds on my Tumbling Tom plants. I hope the fruit will be worth eating, because the seeds were very expensive – nearly £3.00 for the packet!