Tag Archives: tomatoes

This month in the garden…

19 Sunday Feb 2017

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snowdrops

Signs of hope are everywhere

Well. Hasn’t it got busy around here lately.

There I was, listening morosely to the tumbleweed (well, gales and splattering rain) and wondering if the winter would ever end. And then all of a sudden spring sprung. The frosts retreated, the snowdrops came out, and everyone emerged blinking in the watery February sunlight.

And all that sulking indoors has left a ton of stuff to do in the garden, so I’m already behind before I’ve even begun. And now that we can all agree it’s spring, there are garden articles to write and book proposals to hone and student assignments to mark and garden holidays to plan… Welcome to a new year!

Here’s what’s on my to-do list right now – all to cram into the remaining fortnight before it gets even more crazy in March. Wish me luck…

Hitching up the propagator: I think I actually love my Vitopod. It’s not often I say this about a bit of kit, but this has really transformed the way I can garden. It’s eye-wateringly expensive, but believe me: it’s worth it. The moment it comes out of storage each spring is the moment my year begins. 

Sowing tomatoes: See above. This wouldn’t be possible, this early, without a heated propagator – and a good one at that. I set mine to 20°C, and then once the seedlings are up switch the thermostat down to about 12°C to grow them on. Frost? What frost?

Sowing the earliest root crops: I like to get an early crop of the hardy stuff going as soon as I can (cue: heated propagator again. Sorry). It’s too cold to sow yet, even in an unheated greenhouse; my rule of thumb is 7-10°C day and night before I’ll risk it. But once the toms are finished, turnips, beetroot and kohlrabi go in at 12°C and germinate like a dream.

Planting Jerusalem artichokes: There’s planting to be done outside, too; this year I picked up some of the not-quite-as-knobbly Jerusalem artichoke, ‘Fuseau’, along with the seed potatoes. They’re tall, and have flashy golden sunflowers in summer, so they’re going straight into the ground in the exotic edibles garden. Just hope I can keep them in bounds, that’s all – I have tried (and failed) to curb their enthusiasm before…

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Lovely fat Jermor shallots waiting to go in the ground

Planting shallots: Shallots go in earlier than onions, so mine are in the ground this month. As always, I’ve gone for a French variety, ‘Jermor’ – though I’d have preferred ‘Hative de Niort’, fiendishly expensive but the largest, most reliable and – most importantly – tastiest shallot you’ll ever grow.

Experimenting with new stuff: This year it’s Welsh onions – I never have any luck with spring onions, so I thought these perennial bunching onions might prove a useful substitute. Also Carlin peas, aka parched peas, thanks to a kind gift from skilled kitchen gardener and Charles Dowding‘s other half, Steph Hafferty. And tiger nuts, if I can keep them warm enough. All of which more at a later date.

Cutting hazel stems: You’ll find me swinging monkey-like among the thickets of hazel that line the back of our garden this month: they’re perched precariously on the side of the bank but produce some lovely long, straight stems. Cut at around 2″ diameter, just before the buds break, they supply all my beanpole and peastick needs.

Potting up dahlia tubers: What’s a dyed-in-the-wool veggie type like me doing growing something as fancy as dahlias, you ask? Well, dahlias are edible too, so they earn their place in my kitchen garden. Plus they’re dead pretty. I pot mine up in 2ltr pots this month to save them from the slugging they’d otherwise get in the open garden.

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Ripe with promise: the potato crop chitting on my windowsill. Not strictly necessary, but I do like to get them out of their bags while they’re waiting to be planted.

Forcing new potatoes: The one time I bother with growing potatoes in sacks – otherwise an exercise in retrieving the minimum harvest possible from the maximum outlay – is in early spring, when I force a couple of sacks’ worth of new potatoes just for the smug value of eating them weeks before anyone else can.

Mulching & feeding fruit: The fruit garden gets a lot of attention this month: I’ve just about finished all the pruning, but right behind the secateurs are the spade and wheelbarrow. A good scattering of slow-release fertiliser – I’m a fan of pelleted poultry manure or Vitax Q4, but this year I have Carbon Gold to try too – topped off with a thick layer of mulch sets the whole fruit garden up for the rest of the year.

New beginnings

01 Sunday Jan 2017

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Thank goodness 2016 is over.

I’m not sure things look a whole lot better for 2017, but like all gardeners I’m always up for a bit of optimism. And besides, within the safe confines of my garden it is easy to drift off into a world blessedly free of the likes of Herr Trump, Brexit and the wholesale slaughter of my popstar idols.

The world may seem a bit post-apocalyptic beyond the garden gates: but inside, there are sweet peas to pinch out, onions to sow, the last of the veg beds to clear and the compost to turn, just as there were last January and for every January before that. And – assuming Trump doesn’t, in another misguided attempt at ‘locker room banter’ decide to see what that big red button does – for every January to come, too.

I don’t really make New Year resolutions: much too vulnerable to my slightly distracted and forgetful state of mind these days. But January is always a time of promise: of plans made and not yet abandoned, events anticipated and surprises as yet unguessed-at.

So here is what this year promises: and I look forward to every minute.

  • A new life less plastic: I have for some time now been angsting about the quantities of plastic building up in my garden. So this is my year to cut it out, stop taking the lazy option and find some more environmentally-friendly alternatives. I will be blogging about it right here.
  • New fruit: You can never have too much fruit. This year’s trees are apples: James Grieve, Warner’s King and Egremont’s Russet, I think, all on MM106 rootstocks. I am also going to have a go at growing my strawbs up on shelving in a bid to save a few from the mice (who must, by now, be getting very fat indeed).
  • New tomatoes: I’m delving further into the intriguing world of heritage tomatoes, thanks to the packets of tomato seed sent to me from the collection from Knightshayes a year or two ago. Last year it was Sutton’s Everyday – great all-rounder which I’ll be growing again – and ‘White Beauty’, a white beefsteak which had good novelty value but not terribly productive and the flavour was a bit ‘meh’ too. I have half a dozen left to try and new favourites to discover.
  • La nouvelle vie en rose: I shall be spending a lot of time in France. First of all, beginning the long process of sprucing up a little house and garden the family have bought near Bordeaux; second, leading an HF Holidays garden tour around Provence in lavender season.
  • A new book: I have my first book out in September! Look out for it at all good bookshops near you: it’s all about fitting in self-sufficiency around everyday working and family life, from baby-leaf salads to meat and eggs. Basically what I’ve been doing myself for the last decade or two, really. Here’s the official blurb.
  • New days in the garden: Just try to keep me out. As well as my own garden, I’m looking after a beautiful rose garden, ably assisted by a bevy of feathery under-gardeners; building a kitchen garden complete with polytunnel; and tending two little gardens on hillsides where the view is breathtaking every time I raise my head. I anticipate much muddiness and quite a lot of happy days. Bring it on. 

A very happy New Year to you all, and may all your carrots grow straight in 2017!

Splitting the difference

01 Saturday Oct 2016

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Bother. My tomatoes have gone and split on me.

This, of course, is my own silly fault. Tomatoes split for just one reason: the water content of the fruit has been allowed to fall, then all of a sudden someone has come along and guiltily overcompensated with the hose, so flooding the fruits with water. Result: the skins have to expand so rapidly to accommodate all that extra moisture that they can’t cope, and they split. It’s not the end of the world – you can still eat them, though you have to be quick about it before the mould sets in. But it is very annoying.

Splitting (along with blossom end rot, caused by a similar set of circumstances) is a daily risk you run outdoors: you have no control over rainfall of course (I wish) so a sudden downpour after a drought produces exactly the right conditions to split all your fruit. In a greenhouse under cover, where these were grown, there’s simply no excuse. Except bone idleness on the part of a hose-shy gardener, of course.

Some tomato varieties are resistant to splitting: ‘Maskotka’, ‘Terenzo’ and ‘Orkado’ are just three of those which take longer to give way than others, so they’re very well worth trying outdoors given our current yo-yoing weather conditions.

But generally I find tomatoes resistant to splitting have thick, chewy skins – partly no doubt what helps them put up with inconsistent water levels without cracking. And I do like a tomato with a thin skin.

The ones in the pic are ‘Suttons Everyday’, a 1930s heirloom cultivar I was given to try out along with a lot of other heirloom tomatoes. It’s a fine tomato: medium sized, good flavour, great all-rounder as the name would suggest: and with lovely thin skins, which need careful handling if they’re to stay intact.

The current plan is to install automatic watering next year: I have my eye on the Irrigatia solar-powered pump, which works out of a water butt and sensibly powers its battery only when the sun is out and you need the extra water. Inspired. I shall report back, so watch this space.

This month in the garden…

02 Friday Sep 2016

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Onions about to come out of the ground and be turned into fetching kitchen ornaments

Onions about to come out of the ground and be turned into fetching kitchen ornaments

Here’s a thing. I like September. August is either sweaty or disappointingly rainy (the former, this year); and there’s not much going on in the garden. September, on the other hand, is usually balmy and gentle, with just enough rain; the veg garden is pumping out produce and there’s a new energy about my gardening what with the start of the autumn – and so the end of one gardening season and the beginning of another. So here’s where you’ll find me this month:

Picking beans: and how. I think I may have slightly overdone it this year. Six wigwams, three French (Blue Lake, Cobra and a heritage variety with pink seeds) and three runner (Moonlight, Lingua di Fuoco and a rather badly misjudged variety of bog-standard stringy). I am picking Every. Single. Day.

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More beans…

Removing caterpillars: there is – again – a plague. Great rows of them on the nasturtiums I so thoughtfully supplied as decoy plants: well all I can say is that they eat the nasturtiums, then move on cheerfully to my kale, cabbage and Brussels sprouts. So that’s one companion planting idea that doesn’t work, then.

Planting onions: specifically, autumn-sown, Japanese or overwintering onions (you’ll find them under all three names). There used to be a very limited selection of these but I’m gratified to see that’s now changing. I look forward to sampling a few new varieties this year.

Drying onions: and as the next crop goes in, the previous crop comes out. My maincrops have done pretty well this year and have died back nicely – time to hoick them out of the ground and plait them prettily to hang in the kitchen.

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Now these I will never tire of. Pick and pop in the freezer straight away and they come out as good as the day you picked them.

Picking raspberries: see beans. I am not meant to be able to grow raspberries in my chalky soil, but my rampant ‘Autumn Bliss’ have clearly failed to read the rule book. They look a little yellow around the gills in places, but it hasn’t affected the harvest one jot.

Pinching out tomato sideshoots: I think they get a bit annoyed at the constant pinching out earlier in the year and start redoubling their efforts, sending up stems straight from the base of the plant. It feels mean – but I want toms, not green growth.

Weeding: it ain’t over till the fat lady sings, you know. And she seems to have lost her voice just at the moment. I am fighting a losing battle that only cold weather will end.

Processing apples: I can’t help feeling slightly resentful at this time of year that I spend more time in the kitchen than in the garden. But so be it: the apple crop is particularly good this season so I’m making stewed apples, juice and crumbles.

Summer pruning cherries: It’s a bit past summer but actually this is the very best time to summer-prune fans and espaliers as they don’t have as much time to grow sappy new frost-prone growth. Just don’t leave it too close to October. My fans have got away a bit, but I’m hoping to wrestle them back into order.

Hedges: We have half a mile of wild Somerset hedgerow around our garden, loaded with brambles, hawthorn, blackthorn and just about anything else with a prickle. ‘Nuff said. I try to do it just once a year: more often and I think I’d just move.

 

Life in the greenhouse: August

21 Sunday Aug 2016

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Summertime… and the watering is endless….

Every day I am to be found in the greenhouses behind a hose – possibly my least favourite job in the garden. Ah well, I can’t be doing the fun stuff all the time.

It’s a good time, though, to take time just standing and looking at my plants (after all, there’s not much else you can do). Stand staring for a while and you’ll spot that early outbreak of aphids, or the yellow mottling that signals the start of red spider mite. And the earlier you spot trouble, the sooner you can head it off.

In this greenhouse – the cucumber greenhouse this year, which means there are also cucamelons, peppers and an aubergine or two in here, plus an almost-finished pot of mixed salad which really needs to go outdoors – I’ve also been peering at the weed seedlings and noticicing that several are actually self-seeded French marigolds, left over from last year when I underplanted the tomatoes in here with them.

This is very gratifying, as it means a) my tardiness with the weeding has paid off and b) French marigolds can self seed – who knew?! Saves me a lot of time faffing about with seed trays and propagators – all I have to do is leave the heads on to set seed and I’m done.

IMG_4026 The cucumbers are in full production now: and that means I’m in the middle of my annual cucumber glut. I’m picking one or two a day at the moment, far more than we can possibly eat. The plan is to slice and pickle them instead of gherkins (which have – again – been an abject failure this year): must find a recipe.

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And in Greenhouse no. 2 the tomatoes are at last really getting going: I planted them out far too late this year after getting distracted just when I should have been clearing the shelving, late-sown seedlings and containers out, so they hung around in pots much longer than they should have. Just green fruits so far but all looking promising.

These are heritage varieties, and rather special ones at that: they’re from a little packet of treasure sent me by the chap who looks after the 103-variety-strong heritage tomato collection at Knightshayes in Devon. On the right are ‘White Beauty’, aka ‘Snowball’ – a hefty white beefsteak; on the left, ‘Sutton’s Everyday’ which sound nice and reliable; and at the end ‘Jersey Sunrise’ which I’m promised offers exceptional flavour. There are about a dozen other varieties in the package I’m intending to work my way through over the next few years.

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And I couldn’t possibly sign off without mentioning the newest arrival in this side. Over winter I lost my beloved rocoto chilli – it was coming into its fourth year, and last year was so vigorous and enormous it hit the ceiling of the greenhouse and I needed to construct a support frame for it out of 2×1 roofing battens to stop it muscling out the plants around it. Covered in lipstick-scarlet fruits, so many I gave them to family and friends and still had bags left over in the freezer, it was my pride and joy.

I hadn’t done anything particularly different from the previous three years, so I’m thinking that rocotos (also known as tree chillies) are actually just naturally short-lived and don’t last much longer than three or four years.

Anyway, there’s no problem that doesn’t also offer an opportunity: so I took the chance to ring the changes and try another chilli you’re supposed to be able to overwinter. Introducing my Aji chilli: aka Capsicum baccatum and another of the slightly hardier, earlier fruiting varieties. This one has yellow fruits, much more like cayenne types in that they’re thin-skinned, so I should be able to dry them (unlike rocotos which are too fleshy) and also not quite as hot as the tongue-blistering fruits on my lost plant.

As before, I’ve planted it in the greenhouse border; as before, I’m expecting it to reach a spectacular height and generally become a bit of a talking point. Watch this space!

So farewell then…

14 Saturday Nov 2015

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tomatoes

…greenhouse tomatoes. I have cleared this year’s crop: always a marker that you can no longer kid yourself: the season has really, truly ended.

I’ve been putting it off for a while, mainly because the ‘Roma’ plum tomatoes – pictured above – have been gratifyingly ripening at last. I’ve been waiting for them for ages: they grew like mad then just sat there with a load of green tomatoes, taunting me. But now the cold(ish) weather and dull days are here they’ve decided to get on and ripen everything. Don’t they read the textbooks or anything?

It did occur to me to wait till the bitter end with them, but I need the space for the winter salads which are in the cold frame and already a couple of weeks overdue for their transition into the greenhouse.

The other two varieties, ever-reliable ‘Gardener’s Delight’ and ‘Black Cherry’, have been prolific but undeniably over for quite some time now, sad grey raggy shadows of their former selves. Still got a few of the last green cherries off them though.

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I actually like getting green tomatoes at the end of the season and make no particular extra efforts to ripen them. You can fry them (as in Whistlestop Café) – Nigel Slater’s recipe calls for garlic mayonnaise to dip them in too.

Or better: turn them into green tomato chutney. This is one of the finest you can make: tart, crisp, rich and utterly delicious. Here’s my recipe:

2.3kg (5lbs) green tomatoes
450g (1lb) onions
1 tablespoon salt
225g (8oz) raisins
225g (8oz) sultanas
a thumb of root ginger
a red chilli
1 tablespoon black peppercorns
12 cloves
570ml (1 pint) malt vinegar
450g (1lb) Demerara sugar

Chop tomatoes and onions and tip into a pan along with the salt, raisins and sultanas. Pour over the vinegar and give it all a good stir.

Now chop the ginger and chilli and put into a little bag made out of muslin along with the peppercorns and cloves. Tie the bag firmly round the neck with string and float this in the pan.

Add the sugar and bring to the boil, stirring all the time so the sugar dissolves completely. Then turn down the heat until it’s just simmering – a sort of energetic blup is what you need – then leave the lid off and let it carry on cooking, stirring occasionally.

You will read in recipes that chutney takes a couple of hours to cook: this is baloney. It takes about six hours of gentle blipping for the liquid you start with to turn into a brown molten chutney, thickening to the point where if you pull a wooden spoon across the top it leaves a channel for a few seconds. You’ll need to stir more frequently towards the end of cooking time to prevent it sticking to the bottom.

Once it’s ready, spoon into sterilised jars (good wash in hot water then ten minutes in the oven at 100 degrees). Leave for three months to mellow before eating. Yum.

October garden: Greenhouses and fruit garden

23 Wednesday Oct 2013

Posted by in garden design, greenhouse, landscaping, my garden

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It’s amazing what you can fit into an 8×6 greenhouse: here be melons, cucumbers, chilli ‘Razzmatazz’, okra, sweet peppers and my amazing tree chilli, now taller than me

The slow dying of the greenhouses is the swansong of my year. They’re the last to go: long after the veg beds outside are brown with dead foliage and slimy with rot, the cucumbers are still challenging me to find new recipes and the chilli peppers are suffusing with colour from green to orange to red.

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Smaller but perfectly formed: ‘Sweet Crunch’ cucumbers, still going strong

It’s been a good year: and a bad. I have two greenhouses, facing each other in the lee of a hedge across the coldframe I made for my old garden (it’s falling to pieces now – a combination of age and a blackthorn tree just above which keeps dropping branches at inconvenient moments).

In one greenhouse I plant cucumbers, melons, peppers and anything else I fancy growing that year: in the other are my tomatoes.

I always start the year so optimistically with my toms: I love to try new varieties or revisit old ones. This year it’s been Gardeners’ Delight, Costoluto Fiorentino (quite the best beefsteak for flavour bar, perhaps, Brandywine) and the plum tomatoes Rio Grande.

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Not so successful. The other greenhouse has been sick with blight for months: nothing will grow in there but the marigolds. Pretty as they are, you can’t eat them.

But despite the dry weather, despite the perfect growing conditions of this blissfully warm summer, the blight got in.

I mulched with compost from the bins outside: mistake no. 1, as it no doubt carried blight spores. Then a pane of glass in the roof lost a corner, so the rain – laden, too, with spores – could spatter the Costolutos with fatally infected water. And the bush tomatoes I had in the corner – ‘The Amateur’ – turned out to be the most blight-prone tomatoes I’ve ever grown, finishing off my other plants by incubating and then spreading the plague.

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This was meant to be a ‘Black Beauty’ aubergine: but it’s turned out more like a ‘Pinstripe’. Duff seeds – veg which haven’t grown into what they said on the packet – have been a bit of a feature this year.

Well: it’s a lesson learned. This winter’s to-do list includes changing the soil in this greenhouse; replacing the broken panes; and fumigating with a sulphur candle. Then next year I shall use nothing but the cleanest compost and water with tap water. I’m considering growing only blight-resistant varieties, too: ‘Losetto’, ‘Ferline’ and ‘Fantasio’, perhaps.

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My fruit garden: the only ‘finished’ bit of the garden (and even then it needs a netting cage, quite a few more plants and a bit of extra path put in). My little still small place of calm.

On the plus side, my fruit garden is looking wonderful. I planted it just last winter with two maiden cherries, a redcurrant, a couple of blackcurrants raised from cuttings taken from plants I had on my allotment, and a slew of raspberries. Oh, and a bed of strawberries, of course.

You’re not supposed to grow fruit on chalk, and my soil is grey with the stuff. But as a gardener to the core, I’m going to try anyway. So far I’m encouraged: the raspberries have not turned yellow as I expected them to (though three canes have turned up their toes for reasons unknown); the cherries are thriving; and the blackcurrants have had their first fruits already.

Here’s how it looked in 2010:

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