Tomatoes and sunburn

I had an awesome weekend in the garden, had a good tidy up and got a lot of weeding done … I also got my first sunburn of the 2013/2014 summer, whoops!  The carrot and radish seeds are in the garden finally and I’ve evicted the spare tomato seedlings to make room for more up and coming seedlings.  The handy husband has also been busy, jerry rigging a plastic tray as a shelf in the greenhouse for seedlings to keep the out of the way and building this awesome vertical herb garden on the fence for lettuces and annual herbs.  The cat is not being so helpful, a new game appears to be digging up the non-frilly lettuces or biting and shredding the frilly ones, hence the vertical herb garden and a liberal sprinkling of skunk pellets.

A vertical herb garden

I over-did it on the tomato seeds a bit and had a lot of spares, I gave a couple away and sent an email around my workplace offering the rest for a $1 to cover pot/soil costs, I sold them all and earned myself a nice little bit of pocket money which I am planning on spending on some more seed raising mix!

Tomato season starts here, barely visible!

But just a week later ... things are growing fast!

I couldn’t keep up with the tomatoes last year and was a bit sick of picking them towards the end of their season, at one stage I was picking a huge bowlful every day, but they are the thing I have missed the most once I’d had a break.  I’ve used up all my frozen pasta sauces from the freezer now and I can’t wait to be able to refill them.  I’ve still got a few frozen whole tomatoes rolling around like snooker balls in the bottom of the freezer but I may have to resort to buying a few tins before the next harvest to tide me over.  I’ve only bought 2 punnets of fresh tomatoes since last summer, mainly because they just don’t taste as good, I’ve been spoilt! 

Last year's bumper harvest

 I was a bit foolish and forgot to make a note of what tomato varieties I planted last year and I didn’t even think about saving seeds.  Luckily I had a few self-seeding cherry tomatoes seedlings in the greenhouse.  I’m experimenting with a container cherry tomato called Minibelle this year which is meant to be a bushy, compact plant so it won’t go everywhere like last year’s triffids.  I’ve planted more big tomato plants this year, cherries are great for eating but the bigger ones are more useful for those pasta sauces.  I’ve also planted some Sungold, yellow cherry tomatoes for a bit of eye-pleasing variety in the salads.

Just a few plants can give a decent crop!

All the garden centres are chock full of tomato seedlings at the moment, so go out and buy some, you won’t regret it!  They’d need a windowsill or a greenhouse or even one of those plastic mini-glasshouse things for a couple more weeks until it warms up a tad more, but then they can be planted in the garden/greenhouse or containers in a sunny spot.  They’ll be happy on a patio/deck/balcony/windowbox as long as they’ve got some support, like a bamboo stake in the pot, or a trellis, or a friend of mine ties hers to the drainpipe!

If you are planting out very young seedlings you can plant them in a deep hole so that just their top leaves are showing, this means the covered leaves will put out roots and give you a stronger plant.  This can be handy when the plants have grown taller than you are!  I had to put a little extra soil around the base of a couple of my plants last year because they were top heavy and the roots were starting to show, but tying them up with good support will help with this too.

If you want lots of juicy tasty fruit (I’m assuming you do, otherwise why bother!), then feed them and they will feed you in return J  As soon as the flowers start showing they will appreciate some food, I used Jobe’s tomato fertiliser spikes as they are so easy to use, just stick them in the ground near the plants.  Then when the plants are in full fruit production and looking a bit tired and maybe a bit yellow around the leaves I’ll give them a booster with some Thrive soluble plant food. I can almost smell that smell of a greenhouse full of tomato plants, can’t wait! 

So that’s all pretty easy so far, and it is really that easy … apart from laterals … there is a lot of panicky sounding advice about laterals on the interwebs.  It’s really not that hard, I’ll let you google laterals for a comprehensive explanation but in brief if you don’t pick the laterals you’ll get a lot of plant and not much tomato. If you pick all the laterals you will basically end up with a single plant stem with branches coming off it and hopefully lots of tomatoes.  I left some of the earlier laterals on my plants to give a bigger plant with about 4 main stems.  Laterals are a bit of a third wheel, in the photo below you can see the stem and the branch and then this interloper in the middle, just pinch it off like the photo person is about to do and you’ll be all nice and tidy!  Try and get them while they are still very small, if the laterals have grown really big it can do some damage to the plant when you remove it or let in infections (maybe that is why the internet is so panicky about laterals?) but I normally just have a hunt for them when I am watering them or picking fruit, it doesn’t take long.

Just twist these bad boys off :)

I’ll pass on some of my tomato glut recipes nearer the time, including an awesome sweet & sour sauce or chilli jam, mmmmmmm.   Go on, try some tomato growing!