Tomatoes

Blow me down

Until last week you would have been forgiven for thinking we were living in a dry inland country with no wind. Our small frogs as they developed from tadpoles had never seen rain water. The pond was completely dried up and the temporary dwelling of the washing up bowl was kept topped up from the tap. There was not much fun for kite flyers but it was fantastic for the micro light plane that adored the skyline on the Swilley every evening for an hour.

I was driving around town early last week and it looked like autumn, in a leaf drop sort of way. There were loads of detached leaves blowing around the pavements and piling up at the side of the road. The difference was that the leaves were green and they were mainly still attached to young fresh pieces of the branch they had happily clung onto during the long, warm, sunny spell. The perfect growing conditions produced plenty of new soft growth on trees, shrubs and plants that didn’t really seem to have any need to protect themselves and toughen up to the rigours of what life will eventually be throwing at them. Just like us humans, plants need a bit of turbulence every now and then to cope more effectively with life.

As the weather changed, I put out a tweet for people to put their summer bedding pots and hanging baskets in a sheltered spot. Hanging baskets don’t cope very well with the wind and the weight of the container, could fetch the plaster and bracket off of the wall, and the banging could keep you up all night.

Cosseted Tomatoes

I was so involved spreading the word that I forgot to check my own plants. I don’t have bedding but do tend to my tomato plants. The indoor ones were obviously fine, if the temperature gets a bit chilly for them we light a fire and the only wind they are subjected to is when we walk past them on the way to the kitchen.

It was the ones on the outside wall that didn’t fare well. I had supported them with natural twine, perfect for the planet because of its biodegradability, but not so good for coping with tension as the plants bowed. It didn’t take much to snap the string. The weight of the plants combined with the force of the wind soon had the string ends flapping aimlessly in the air. Thankfully all was not lost. I had left all of the bottom leaves on and this supported the plants, stopping the stems from being damaged.

The indoor plants were stripped of their lower leaves, partly due to the fact that they were going yellow and brown and it is easier to get the watering can nozzle to the soil, but mainly because we needed to see out of the windows occasionally and let a bit of light in. I didn’t see the point of removing the ones outside and I’m glad I left them on.

Because the plants outside are growing in bags, fixing sticks was a bit awkward, hence the string being used. I think I have solved the issue by simply doubling up the twine and tying it around the drainpipe, I’ll keep you posted.

Here are a few tips for getting the most from your tomato plants:

Location: Give the plants as much light as you can. Ideally no less than 6 hours of sunshine per day, 10 hours if you can. (We can dream).

Soil: Use a rich mixture of high nitrogen compost, this applies to pot grown or ground planted tomatoes.

Variety: There are 2 general groups of tomatoes:
Indeterminate tomatoes: these are upright vine or cordon plants
Determinate tomatoes: These grow bushy and the miniature ones are ideal for baskets and don’t need pruning.

Care: Regular watering keeps the plants healthy and also stops the fruit splitting. Regular watering times reduces this problem significantly. Ideally the water will be slightly tepid. This will prevent any shocking of the plants or cooling of the soil.

Pinch out: As the upright plants grow it is a good idea to pinch out the side shoots that you find growing from the main stem at the base of the leaf. Once the plant has the required number of trusses, (four in my case, but 5 would be ideal too) the main stem can be pinched out to top the plant and prevent further tomato production. That way the energy will be channelled to fruit growth. Keep an eye out for the side shoots though, as the plant will throw more of those out to compensate for loosing the growing tip.

Feeding: Once fruit starts to appear, the plants can be given a bi-weekly supplement of a suitable tomato feed.

Pests and disease: check for pests and disease, removing any dead or discoloured leaves. Removing the old leaves at the base could also prevent soil borne infections getting into the plant. Insects can usually be picked off if you catch them early, if not you could use a natural organic pesticide, washing up liquid usually does the trick. There are a lot of things that could go wrong with the plants, like blight (as in potatoes) mould, fusarium wilt, leaf miners, aphids, whitefly and cutworm attack.

Let’s stay positive though. If the soil is good, the water is regular and there is plenty of fresh air circulating, you probably won’t have to bother looking for ways of coping with pests and diseases. What you will have to look forward too is a healthy crop of delicious tomatoes, ready to compliment the salad bowl

Comparisons

Sunday morning Miscellany

 I don’t believe it. No time for growing vegetables?

I’m driving along the road listening on a beautiful Sunday morning listening to Sunday Miscellany on RTE Radio 1. Usually I just let the voices drift over me but today I’m taking notice as a woman reminisces about how their parents used to grow vegetables. She was pondering on how they managed to find the time to garden without having two cars, a dishwasher, microwave and other modern day devices to save precious time, as she can barely have time to cut her grass.

I’m finding myself talking to the radio; I suppose it makes a change from chatting to the tomatoes on the windowsill in the front room.

Making comparisons

Grass is more labour intensive than growing your own vegetables, I tell the unresponsive box. If you think about it, most of us are out every week for hours in the heat of the day looking after our lawns. No sooner have you finished cutting and composting, it looks untidy again as the weeds start to appear before the mower goes back in the shed. It’s a constant battle with the mower, buying petrol, coaxing it to start in the first place, unblocking the grass without chopping your fingers off. It’s not good for the environment either with more and more chemicals on the market claiming to give you that bowling green finish and insects being sliced by the mower blades.

A vegetable patch on the other hand, when set up in early spring will only need a slight tickle with a hoe to keep the weeds down once a week. The rest of the time can be spent relaxing in the garden (without a noisy mower and strimmer), harvesting the peas and beans and munching on the strawberries. Its not that we need to completely get rid of lawns but there can be a balance. A manicured area of grass, a patch of meadow, fruit trees and bushes and of course a veggie garden.

Positive mental attitude

The person is telling me that her parent’s incentive for the edible garden was to be more self-sufficient and save money. But after a few years of hard labour and poor crops the father gave up and put grass seed down instead. The crops that didn’t perform were beetroot; they were tiny specimens because of the poor soil (see last weeks article), and peas. It wasn’t that the peas didn’t produce but that as a child she loved eating them straight from the pod so few reached the plate. It’s simple, I shout, stop growing beetroot and grow more peas.

Muddling through

The hardest part of changing your lawn to a bed is not just growing the veg, but growing your confidence and getting a little bit of know-how, I think to myself as I navigate a roundabout. I recall when I became a parent for the first time. I bought the parenting books, watched the DVD’s, listened to endless stories from other parents and bought all of the equipment that was supposed to make the transition from self-indulgent singleton to responsible parent. When the baby was born everything I learnt went out of the window and I found myself just muddling through from one day to the next, with the least amount of discomfort for both the baby and me.

Switch off your brain

The same fate can befall someone who is considering starting vegetable growing. It’s the thinking that’s the hard, tiring part, and on the whole should be avoided at all costs.

“Switch off your brain for a while”. I’m telling the person on Miscellany. I’ve been gardening now for 30 years and I still can’t get to grips pests and diseases. Why clutter up your brain with a load of information about pests that you don’t have? If something does start munching your crops then it’s time to ask a friend or go on the internet. I’m still muddling around myself in the garden and every year pick up more pearls of wisdom.

Of course there will be an initial learning curve –which does take time, preparing a bed, making sure that you give appropriate space to each plant but it’s a slow process –if you make a mistake in one year, its not a disaster, just change it next year –this time scale is maybe why older people like gardening more than younger people who don’t do delayed gratification well. There is never any rush, what you can’t do at one time, you can even leave for another season. Sit by a big open fire in winter to plan your planting. Prepare the feeding of the beds with compost and manure late autumn when it’s cooler and you are not being chased around by midges and dopey flies. The edible garden has a relaxed, all year calendar, not just a few mad months of growing in summer like a lawn.

Is it just a fad?

The woman on the radio feels that growing your own might be a fad and after waning interest, will re-appear in 30 years time. Hopefully then, she says, she might have enough time to grow her own like her parents used to do.

Do it now. I am encouraging the voice over the airwaves. Start small. Try planting some salad –lettuce, radish, spring onions, Maybe a couple of strawberries and a currant bush, something easy and that you will enjoy eating.

Her fantasy garden could become a reality a lot more easily than she imagines. There are companies springing up around the country that will make you a raised bed, fill it with soil, plant the vegetables in it for you and even come back to do the weeding throughout the growing period, if that’s what you want.

Thankfully the Suburban Farm piece on Sunday Miscellany is only five minutes long. She concludes by saying that her parents found the vegetable gardening “backbreaking and tedious”. They are two words which I may associate with looking after a large lawn, but not my raised beds.

The voice fades out and another person pops up to talk about leaving school when she was young. Thank goodness for that, I am feeling my blood pressure lower and fall back into the verbal comfort that makes this radio show generally so relaxing.

Soil Care

Poor soil with courgettes struggling

My lads were making choc chip cookies last week and they missed out one ingredient, not something obvious like chocolate either. We didn’t have any vanilla essence. This made a really big difference to the final taste and instead of them being eaten as soon as they were taken out of the oven piping hot like they usually are, they were left on the kitchen table.

Our dog hasn’t got such a critical palate though and managed to eat the whole plateful in just a few seconds after the lads walked out of the room. They will complement the pound of butter she ate last week.

Good soil, the courgettes are thriving

Soil care

Soil, just like ingredients in baking, needs to be mixed in just the right quantities to make plants grow well. Getting a good loam (soil structure) to hold plants in place and store nutrients until the plant roots need them requires a mixture of sand, silt, organic matter and clay. In my experience, most gardens have a varying mixture of both good and poor soil. In our garden, we have an area where the bulk of the vegetables are being grown. We set up the raised beds and added loads of organic matter such as well-rotted horse muck, and the contents of the compost bin (lovely stuff). At the top of the garden we cut a long narrow bed out of the lawn to increase our veggie produce. This bed is very near to a mature escallonia hedge and willow tree, which both starve the bed of water, light and nutrients. We also had run out of our horse muck and compost so it this bed wasn’t so well fed –just a few handfuls of chicken pellets We planted the same batch of courgettes into both the good growing area and the poor bed. The lush leafy growth of the healthy plants compared to the diseased looking stunted growth of the courgettes in the nutrient and water starved one makes for interesting comparisons between the two areas.

Weeds

Weeds are also a good indicator of how a soil is performing. There are some types that like to grow on nitrogen rich soil, such as nettles, whilst others take over poor ground without competition from rivals. We were on Inishtrahull Island last week with the Inishowen Organic Group and I saw a large area on a hillside that was just covered in daisies. There was no soil to be seen and the plants were seemingly hanging on to the hillside by wrapping their roots around the scree, hardy or what?

Summer Bedding - Getting it right

Getting the right mix of soil is very important in summer bedding plants and containers. There are generally a lot of plants in a very restricted area, especially in hanging baskets. A container might have ten plants all battling it out in soil that would normally be used for just one plant. Most shop bought composts only have enough nutrients on them to last the plants four weeks, so regular feeding and watering is needed. Slow release organic fertiliser can be mixed in (or scattered onto the top if you forgot when you planted them up). Water retaining gel is a good idea too. Again if you forgot to put them in, all is not lost. Simply push a topless plastic pop bottle with the bottom cut off into the basket and fill it with water every day. It is important to keep your containers and baskets well watered –even during wet days.

Home made mix

I was always proud of how well my containers and baskets looked in the summer. I used to make a mix of peat, compost, sand, osmocote and garden soil. One year I didn’t quite get it right. I had got a load of free mushroom compost from the old mushroom polytunnels in Umrican –great for the veggies I have to say. However, it was a disaster for my summer displays. The mixture wasn’t rotted down well enough and the straw leached the nitrogen from the soil. Without a decent environment the poor bedding plants succumbed to all sorts of pests and diseases. The effect was devastating and my displays were pitiful hardly filling the baskets, yellow spotty leaves and barely a bloom in sight. My reputation went downhill fast, but you live and learn. As I am writing our windowsills are covered by pots of strong, healthy tomato plants and even though each one is only in a two-litre pot, they are quickly making their way up their sticks to the ceiling. This is because of good compost, regular watering and constant feeding (three times a day at the moment) With all that constant care and dedication, it doesn’t look as though I will be going on holiday this summer.

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