Tomatoes

Right, back to the tomatoes. Here's what we've got......

Sweet Bite, a cherry variety. They end up huge plants and are easy to grow.
Grosse Lisse, an Australian favourite with medium sized fruit. Usually pretty reliable.
Mortage Lifter, a beefsteak, heirloom variety that can grow up to 3 meters tall. Apparently it was developed in the 1930s by a guy known as Radiator Charlie who used the profits from selling his plants to pay off his mortgage. I've never grown these before so we'll see how big they get.
Roma, these mostly end up being preserved as sauce for winter. They tend to ripen their fruit all at the same time,(determinate), so they're good for this.

All the seedlings are well advanced and already have flowers. I think this is important as sometimes, if the plants are too young, when they hit the rich soil they will be happy to just grow without reproducing. Once they've started to flower they tend to keep flowering. I also planted them deep, well below the pot level, to encourage more roots. They received a good pinch of sulphate of potash to encourage more flowers. It also helps toughen the leaves up against attack. This little guy is one of the Sweet Bites



Beaned

I started to pick the Broad Beans today. They've come on pretty quickly since they eventually started setting pods. First meal tonight, with some pasta I think.

A few more carrots

I've started picking a few more carrots, even if they are still a bit small. They've become sweeter with a slightly deeper orange. I'm not sure why they weren't like this when they were babies. It may be down to the new bed, some sort of nutrient deficiency or maybe too much water when they were young. Or all of the above. I did give them a bit of a feed of fish emulsion and seaweed solution a few weeks ago so maybe that helped. I'll wait another week or so before pulling any more and compare taste.

Podded Out

The peas succumbed to powdery mildew but not before I picked four or five meals out of them, plus regular grazing as I wandered about.. I was pretty pleased with this considering how fresh the bed was when they went in back at the beginning of June.


Today I've pulled down the plants, laid them where they grew, and covered them with some chook poo and straw. One this has broken down I'll dig it in. I wont plant in this until next spring. Tomatoes will go in this bed then as part of my loose crop rotation plan.

Corn

The Honey Sweet corn was planted in the same way as the pumpkins and are now up growing. I planted two seeds in every spot which will get thinned to a single plant shortly. I'll keep two for now as there is something chewing on them and once they get a bit bigger I'll keep the least chewed ones.

Perpendicular Pumpkins

The Butternut pumpkins have been planted in the no-dig section of the garden. The method to do this is to dig a hole down into the straw/manure layers until you reach the moist composted material. I then fill this hole with a mix of soil and compost.

The seeds go into this and around a week later the pumpkins are on their way to perpendicularity.