Tomato Tip

When I pick tomato plants from the nursery I look for ones that have been slightly stressed so they have started flowering. Young pampered ones, when they hit your nice rich bed, will start producing lots of leaves and wont bother flowering until further into the season. The stressed ones that have started flowering will love all the food and keep flowering. Take note though, tomatoes don't need, or like, a lot of nitrogen so stay away from chook poo and stick to cow or sheep. Watering them in with some seasol will help them along and a good sprinkle of sulphate of potash will keep them flowering and toughen them up a bit. Here's my Tigrella that not only has flowers but tiny tomatoes as well. I also trim off the lower leaves and plant the seedlings much deeper than their existing soil depth in the pot. Most plants hate this but tomatoes will send out new roots from the stem.



Sprung Spring

I planted up the first two beds with summer crops on the weekend. This bed is where the potatoes were. This is mostly herbs, coriander, dill, parsley, lemon basil and oregano. There's also some leaves - chicory, mizuna and something called land cress. There's an eggplant tagged Thai Eggplant. I thought these were small black ones similar to the ones I grew last year. Though they may end up being small, green ones like these. I'll found out in a few months I suppose.

I've planted two different types of beans to climb up the black meshing, Blue Lake and Purple King. These will hopefully serve two purposes. To supply beans, obviously, and to provide some afternoon shade for the soft herbs. My back yard gets cooked in summer so with any luck this will work.

The next bed has the first of the tomatoes for this year. A sweet Bite cherry tomato, a heritage type called tigrella and a roma. There's also sweet basil, purple ruffled basil, marigolds and an eggplant called Japanese Long Tom. This is more like what I was after with the Thai Eggplant above. I've also planted beans around the wire for the same reasons above.

Last Spuds

Well, I over estimated the spuds. I ended up with 7kg. I must have dug up the richest square foot before. A bit poor but enough for a few meals. Bangers and mash tonight!
A bit more vigilance slug-wise on my part next year and I should be well sorted for mash, chips and... um...more mash.



First Spuds

As the slugs had decimated my potatoes I decided to dig up a small section of the bed to see what was what. The first few to come up were smaller than an egg but as I dug a bit deeper a few good sized ones came up. Those two in my hand are just over 300g each. The total weight of this first batch was 1kg. Based on this I'm guessing I'll get around 10kg from the bed. Not a great result but I'm happy enough given my inattention to the slug problem.



Quick Overview

Just a quick overview on the rest of the winter veg.
The broad beans are coming along but still no pods setting even though I planted them later than last year and they're about 80cm high.

The garlic is going well. Some of the onions have have bolted to seed though. I removed the flower heads but according to Peter Cundall they're knackered once they've done this. I'll just wait and see.

And the broccoli have done their thing and gone to seed. I've pulled these out now to prepare the bed for this year's tomatoes.





Useful Weeds

Lots of weeds pop up over winter and into spring. Most are just a problem that needs to be dealt with but some have turned out to be welcome. Among the many problems i've had welcome cos lettuce and  red mustard. I've also had about a million wild rocket plants come up. At first I thought, "wow, what a great plant" but that soon changed to, "Wow, what a pain in the arse.", as they came up in every crack in every paving stone in the garden. At least the cos and mustard were a bit more localised.



Poor Spuds

My potatoes have been savaged by slugs. I was sick for about a week so didn't get out in the garden very often and in that time slugs emerged from the ooze and ate all my potatoes. Swine! I'll let them stuggle on until they die totally and see if any spuds have been produced.