This is my Hugelkultur bed. A good crop of tomatoes on the way. I have a seep hose to do the watering but it is supplemented with the watering can. We have had lettuce and potatoes.
I’m happy despite the absence of rain.
Phil
This is my Hugelkultur bed. A good crop of tomatoes on the way. I have a seep hose to do the watering but it is supplemented with the watering can. We have had lettuce and potatoes.
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Tomatoes in the greenhouse are rubbish this year; hardly set any fruit and just gets too hot in there. I also grow outdoors in pots/troughs but the constant watering is hard work. Thinking of growing them in the ground on the veg patch next year.
Courgettes also dissapointing so far.
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I’ve had tons of cherry tomatoes out of the greenhouse but the beefsteak variety has been very disappointing. The same plants in large containers outside have produced less than the greenhouse but the cherry tomatoes have tasted better.
I’m now a bit undecided about what and where I’ll grow them next year.
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My Black Moon tomatoes have been excellent this year. The 30c+ temps we had slowed the ripening down, but there have been no problems at all.
I’ve had loads already from my two 7ft plants outside in pots.
Generally using them in tomato salads
And because I need to use them and make the others ripen, I’m throwing them in pasta dishes. Crab & crayfish ravioli, home-grown aji limon chilli, 3x Black Moons, olive oil, lemon, pepper, garlic, sprinkled with home-grown parsley, couple of nights ago. All you need in life.
The Black Moons are good, not amazingly mind blowing. I will try something else next year.
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My toms are all in the greenhouse, nothing outside. It’s probably not been as consistently hot here in N Wales as it has been further south and I would say the crop is a little less than last year’s but still good. They took a little while to ripen but I believe when the temp is consistently over 30° it slows down the ripening due to the lack of production of certain chemicals needed.
These are our favourites, Crushed Heart. This is our third year with these and they’ll be on the list again for next year.
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Very interesting to read about the various tomato woes due to the extreme heat.
From my experience this has been the poorest crop of toms in a decade or more. I’ve had zero to consume this year, though the first of the beefsteak toms has started to ripen this week.
I’ve a ridiculous potential bounty that has set fruit in the last few weeks but all 7ft or higher and threatening to topple over in the pots. I’ve bound the gargantuan plants together so they don’t collapse under their own weight – not ideal but, approaching mid-August, I’m in salvage territory anyway.
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Wow
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I wondered why one of my roses, a Dublin Bay, was looking much worse than the rest recently - no doubt thanks to these little critters. I would have thought the Great and Blue Tits would have fancied them, but so far no.
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These same little critters have devoured an Acer tree of mine. Just got to let nature take its course.
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Very much so
Worst crop of tomatoes I can ever remember
As with everything in gardening, it takes a lot of thought and you have to adapt. With some plants, stress makes them wilt, scorch or a few marks on the leaves. You water or correct the issuse and they recover fast and that’s that. With things like tomatoes, chillis, figs, lemons, etc, your whole year’s expectations rely on the crop and if it doesn’t work or taste good, it’s very disappointing.
I do read about figs being drought tolerant, but what does drought tolerant mean? It means the plant can withstant drought and then bounce back. Well figs do bounce back, but they also drop their figs. So they’re effectively not drought tolerant if you grow them for the fruit.
With tomatoes, the recent temps in the UK are nothing compared to what Sicily, etc have been growing finest tomatoes in for the past 700 years.
No.1. Choose the variety carefully.
If growing outside in the ground and you don’t intend monitering it’s watering, you need to treat it hard when young, so the roots grow deep into the soil looking for moisture.
If in pots, you will need to monitor every day and if it’s 30c+, you could easily water twice a day.
Growbags are handy, but they’re shallow and the roots are very susceptible to watering.
In a greenhouse, damp down and put shading up and vent early in the day.
Don’t allow too many trusses on one plant.
And don’t remove the leaves!
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Chillis all going great and way ahead than last year.
Golden Nugget is a strange little one. The chillis start out green, then turn purple/black and end up bright orange/yellow. Even the foliage is variegated purple and white on a few leaves.
Golden Nugget was a free pack of seeds with a chilli seed order, but one of the seeds wasn’t even Golden Nugget. No idea what it is, but will look into it. It fell off a table and broke the whole plant in half. What a waste.
I’ve got different fig trees and probably the one I was looking forward to was Little Miss Figgy. Luckily it’s producing nicely.
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This is our Brunswick fig (frosty hardy to -8C). It’s tripled in size this year. It wasn’t doing much until May when the growth took off in the hot weather. We may need to repot it this winter! Never done a fig tree before. We have been using Roots Plants since this.
The nicotiana are from seeds in the well rotted compost we used in the Strawberry raised bed. Verbena likewise.
Star Jasmine and grape also from Roots Plants.
The Money Maker were limited to 4 trusses. The trusses extended instead.
Automatic watering system with drip feeders and seep pipe.
Phil
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Not a great picture of my Golden Nugget (also free) nothing orange yet just a few small dark chillies.
These are Aci Sivri, starting to ripen nicely.
Shishito, still green but will hopefully ripen.
All new varieties for me, will be trying the Aci Sivri soon.
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“Shishito” is that what you say when you eat them raw!
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I grow sweet million cherry tomatoes which I find both consistent and abundant.
I tried super beefsteak f1 this year as big daddy was disappointing the past two years. However these have been just as disappointing and split regardless of which water feed routine I’ve adopted.
I’d be pleased to hear from anyone who successfully grows beefsteak tomatoes in the uk.
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A friend seems to do OK with beefsteak toms using one of those irrigation systems that just keeps dripping water all day and night. These latest so called compost have little water retention properties so he uses soil and compost mixed.
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3 things immediately apparent from the photo that would cause splitting;
Pots too small.
Leaves have been removed.
In a greenhouse.
Three years ago I grew big daddy beefsteak in exactly the same manner and they were ok.
The pots are bigger than they appear and stand in trays which I water every day so they can take up what they need. I’ve recently removed some of the leaves to allow sunlight as they were slow to ripen.
The same thing has happened with my outside beefsteak plants which are grown in 50lt tubs.
I wonder if beefsteak varieties are more susceptible to the high temperatures of the past two summers as the cherry variety has been fine.