Posts Tagged ‘gardeners delight’

Tomato time

It’s the second week in September, and the tomatoes are *just* hitting their stride. I’ve sliced a couple of Brandywines and fried them with our Sunday bacon and egg, and for the last two weeks we’ve been enjoying a small but steady supply of Gardener’s Delights and Tumbling Toms in salads. Today I made a tomato sauce to go with pork meatballs and linguine. I love this time of year.

Trays of tomatoes… and strawberry corner

Today was spent potting up tomato seedlings (see below), and also moving some sluggish strawberry plants from the back garden to the front, where they will in theory get several hours of sun a day rather than just half an hour or so. The display of strawberry plants in the corner actually looks quite attractive in its own right, I think. Of course, the roofless greenhouse to their left (not seen in pic) is definitely NOT a thing of loveliness, but it does act as a convenient shelf for more long trays of strawberry plants. Who knows, I might actually end up picking a dozen strawberries a day at the height of the season, rather than six or so as I did last year. To pot up the strawberries into their respective containers, I used neat home-made compost – which should mean that they’ll be happy! I wish I could be self-sufficient in compost, because that’s easily my biggest expense as a container gardener. Back in March, I syphoned off a good amount of nearly-rotted compost from our Dalek into the hole next to it; six weeks later under its layer of old carpet/bathmat, it’s now ready to use but I need more!

Brandywine tomato seedlings part deux

This is what the Brandywine seedlings look like now I’ve potted them up into individual pots. (It’s Saturday as I write this and the potting up took place on Wednesday. Took me ages, because I had to (a) find enough suitable pots in the corners of the garden, and (b) rinse them off to remove dead snails/spider eggs/worms.) Anyway, the Brandywine seedlings are the ones at the back – the ones towards the front are Gardener’s Pearl. They’ve got smooth-edged leaves, rather than the slightly curly-edged ones that you expect on tomatoes. Today I also potted up ten Gardener’s Delight seedlings, so all being well it should be a tomatotastic summer again!

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!