| Today was spent potting up tomato seedlings (see below), and also moving some sluggish strawberry plants from the back garden to the front, where they will in theory get several hours of sun a day rather than just half an hour or so. The display of strawberry plants in the corner actually looks quite attractive in its own right, I think. Of course, the roofless greenhouse to their left (not seen in pic) is definitely NOT a thing of loveliness, but it does act as a convenient shelf for more long trays of strawberry plants. Who knows, I might actually end up picking a dozen strawberries a day at the height of the season, rather than six or so as I did last year. To pot up the strawberries into their respective containers, I used neat home-made compost – which should mean that they’ll be happy! I wish I could be self-sufficient in compost, because that’s easily my biggest expense as a container gardener. Back in March, I syphoned off a good amount of nearly-rotted compost from our Dalek into the hole next to it; six weeks later under its layer of old carpet/bathmat, it’s now ready to use but I need more! |
 |
| On to the tomatoes. It takes a looong time to pot up this many seedlings. The ones on the left in the yoghurt pots are Brandywine; the ones on the right are Gardener’s Delight. Large yoghurt pots make excellent pots for seedlings – just create some holes in the bottom first (I use one end of a skewer, held in a gas flame, to melt the holes – the plastic is less likely to crack that way.) |
This week is the first week of spring in our household. One reason for designating this particular week as the official end of winter is the fact that we can now close our front door for the first time this year. Every year, in cold/wet weather, it expands (or the door frame shrinks – one or the other), making it impossible to shut. Luckily we have a second, inner door that also locks so it’s not a huge problem – just something of a nuisance.
The second event marking the official start of spring chez Mr & Mrs Beans is the planting of this year’s tomato seeds – Brandywine and Gardener’s Delight (which will be followed by Tumbling Tom, on order from a seller on eBay). Like any small seeds, tomato seeds are fiddly to plant. I’ve evolved a method of doing so, which involves emptying them into a bowl and using a moist finger to pick them up one at a time, and plonk them on the surface of the compost in the tray. (Your hands may already be moist anyway, from handling the compost.)
For the next week or two while the seeds germinate, the seed trays will sit on our dining table. Lest our cats decide that they make nifty litter boxes, I’ve covered them with wire cake trays. (You can’t be too careful when it comes to cats, I’ve realised.)
Have also planted six mouse melon seeds – should be interesting to see if they come up.
| Haven’t done anything in the garden since October, which is why there haven’t been any posts here! It’s been either raining, snowing or just plain too cold to garden. Today though, it was dry and mild, with a real hint of spring in the air. So I did a lot of tidying up that was long overdue, and planted some baby spinach and spring onions. The old door that had been doing duty as an outdoor tabletop had finally started to rot away, so I donned a pair of builder’s gloves and ripped it up. Yes, ripped it up into pieces and filled up two black sacks. It wasn’t hard to do – the door was made from two outer layers of fibreboard separated by pieces of stiff cardboard; the fibreboard was so knackered that you could just tear it away in chunks and fold the chunks to make smaller pieces. (Unfortunately, this did mean that layers of paint peeled off and were evenly distributed all over the garden. So I had great fun sweeping all of that up.) |
 |
| I then had a brainwave about what to do with that leaky, defunct water butt which had been lying in a corner. It’s now been pressed into service as a plinth for one of my containers – see pic. The great thing is that the container is now at chest height so I won’t have to bend down to pick those baby spinach leaves when they finally grow. (No backache!) To stop the water butt from toppling over, I’ve crowded some other things around it – namely, a heavy ceramic pot and an old aluminium dustbin, which is no longer needed as a dustbin ‘cos the council have given us wheelie bins. |
| The rectangular white thing on the ground is a polystyrene fish box, which I’ve planted with some of the strawberry runners that survived the winter. I adopt a “survival of the fittest” policy with strawberries – pot up the runners into small pots early in the autumn, then leave them outside for the whole winter. Then pot up into bigger containers – like the fish box – in the spring. Last year our strawberries were delicious; it’s just a shame there weren’t more of them! I’m hoping to remedy that this year. |
| This little Brandywine beauty had been sitting on our kitchen windowsill for a couple of weeks, slowly ripening. We ate it on Sunday with our customary fry-up. Just the raw, meaty slices – no cooking required. There are still a few more Brandywines left, plus some cherry tomatoes. I shall convert most of the latter into a spaghetti bolognaise today. We had over three pounds of green tomatoes too, which Mr Beans made chutney from last week. This weekend I finally chopped down our tomato plants, distributed the compost on our roses and placed the actual plants in a sack. Kindly neighbour lady is going to take them to her allotment for burning (along with the trimmings from when I pruned said roses). |
 |
I am in two minds about whether to save some Brandywine seeds, as I did last year. I didn’t take care to separate the varieties of container tomatoes so there may have been some cross pollination, which could turn out to have interesting results next year! Think I’ll order some pure-bred seeds on eBay but maybe try growing some saved seeds as an experiment.
| The picture on the right shows what happens if you put your tomatoes on a sunny windowsill to ripen, and you let them touch the window rather than leaving a gap. You have been warned. Sadly, I ended up throwing this specimen, and three of its equally sad mates, away. Ideally, you want to set your ripening tomatoes at least an inch back from the actual window. Having said that, it’s nice to have actually had some sun. So far, September is proving to be more summery than June, July & August put together. And despite the windowsill mishap, we have been enjoying tomato salads for the last couple of weeks. |
 |
Categories:
crops Tags:
ripening, tomatoes
This groaning set of shelves, with cunningly placed plastic mug risers, would have graced our kitchen about a month ago, if we’d had a normal summer. But as everyone in Britain knows, this hasn’t been a normal summer. We’re only eating tomatoes at all this year because I’ve been obsessive when it comes to looking after them – cutting off the bottom leaves (this ensures that the growing fruits get more nutrients), putting them in the sunniest places possible (ha ha), and feeding them with comfrey tea every now and again. And because I take them indoors to ripen off the moment they even start to look as though they might go yellow.
What you see on the shelf (apart from two figs – also a month late) is pretty well all the tomato varieties I planted this year: Gardener’s Delight, Moneymaker, Mamande and Tumbling Tom. The only one that isn’t there is Brandywine. I do have some Brandywines coming along, but they’re not even ripe enough to pick yet. Fingers crossed that we have an Indian summer, otherwise Mr Beans will be making chutney out of them.
PS: The caravan parked outside isn’t ours. I don’t know why I felt I had to point that out.
Mr Beans and I have a saying that one of the saddest things to have to do in life is to carry an empty cat box back from the vet’s. That’s what we had to do yesterday – because we had to have our cat Empress Felicity, from whom I take my screen name, put to sleep. She was about twenty years old and started to go downhill in the final month of her life, until organ failure and the almost total inability to use her back legs meant that she spent most of the time lying right next to a special litter tray we’d set up in the dining room. This was obviously no life for any cat, never mind one of Felicity’s regal temperament.
Empress Felicity wasn’t always called Empress Felicity. We named her that when we took her in three years ago. Due to a case of mistaken gender identity as a kitten, she’d actually been called Felix.
So how did Felix/Felicity come into our lives? She belonged to an acquaintance of ours, a widower called Brian. When Brian had to move to a second floor flat without a garden, Felix didn’t take kindly to the lack of freedom and several times she tried to escape down the stairs and out the front door. This was obviously not on, especially as the block of flats faced out onto a main road. So Brian, knowing us to be cat lovers, asked us if we would be interested in giving Felix a home. “She’s a horrible cat, actually.” (Yeah, go on Brian – really sell her to us.) “She was my wife’s, and I never got on with her. Every time I try to stroke her, she goes for my hand.”
This didn’t exactly sound promising. I suggested an afternoon for Brian to bring Felix round to us, so that we could see just how horrible she was and what we’d be dealing with if we decided to take her on.
The day came. In walked Brian, with a large cat box. From the cat box came the occasional deep, loud and tuneless miaow. Very much like the kind of miaow that Siamese cats have. Cat box was set on the living room floor, and the flap was opened. Felix emerged, looking around and obviously ready to take on all comers.
Our other two cats, Blackie and Lottie, saw the intruder. Lots of hissing ensued on all sides. This didn’t look promising. Nonetheless, Mr Beans and I said yes – we’d give Felix a home (there was never really any doubt, though).
Felix spent the next three weeks camped behind the sofa, emerging only when necessary. Eventually she decided to come out properly, and an uneasy truce developed between Felix and the other two cats, who both treated Felix with a measure of caution and respect. For Felix had a certain presence. She could sit at the foot of the bed and her Siamesey miaow was like the command of an absolute monarch: “Mr Beans! Want foooooood!” Eventually Blackie cottoned on to Felix’s ability to martial her human servants, and trailed along in Felix’s wake, knowing that he too would benefit from any food that was going. We dubbed them the Black and White Kitty Committee.
While Mr Beans was Felix’s butler, I was her companion. She would come on my lap and head butt my chest – it was most endearing and as far from “horrible” as you could get. Eventually it got to the point where both Felix and Lottie could claim bits of my anatomy/the sofa at once, without any problems.
Peace breaks out. On the sofa with Felix and Lottie
Felix’s other hobby – apart from eating – was lying on the wall in our back garden, sunning herself. She also spent time in the front, holding court with some of the neighbourhood cats. She was an absolute star, and the house feels very empty without her.
Today I picked our first roast dinner-for-two sized handful of runner beans. (I had picked four or five beans earlier this week, but they don’t count.) Obviously the lateness of the beans is down to our dreary summer, but actually looking back at last year’s posts, the beans aren’t that late – maybe a week or so, perhaps.
The same cannot be said of our tomatoes, none of which are ripe yet. This time last year we were picking Gardener’s Delights and hanging basket toms every single day. This year, there are a few Gardener’s Delights which look almost on the point of turning red, but none of them are actually edible yet. We do have hundreds of tiny green fruit though. My feeling is that all our tomatoes will ripen at once in mid-August, thus prompting a frantic session of cooking: freezer portions of tomato, onion and garlic pasta sauce on the one hand, and chutney on the other. Mr Beans makes fabulous chutney.
I’m glad I never bothered with courgettes this year. I think I will wait until the sunspot cycle does its thing and we’re back to sizzling summers again.
Last month’s hailstorm had a horrible effect on my tomato plants but they’re now doing nicely thank you, although due to the rubbish summer we’re having they are lagging behind somewhat. Plenty of flowers, but no fruit yet. On this exact day last year, I was picking the first of my hanging basket tomatoes, so that puts it into perspective. The tomatoes on the steps (see pic immediately below) are Moneymaker and Brandywine. The ones in the pic below are Gardener’s Delight and the basket just visible to the right of them has Tumbling Toms (even those are still just at the flower stage – it really is a late year). The dried straw-like husky things you can see in the top pic are the Green in Snow Oriental mustard seed pods I mentioned in the previous post.
Gardener’s Delight
| Saving seeds appeals to my frugal tendencies (if the seeds on the right grow OK, then I’ll have saved myself £1.50 – woohoo!) On a more serious note, I reckon it’s something all vegetable gardeners should get into. Being able to grow beans, tomatoes or salad leaves from seeds you’ve saved yourself won’t save you a fortune and it won’t fend off starvation if we ever go down the same economic route as Greece, but it will help. A bit. I spent a rare sunny afternoon this week getting these seeds out of the dried pods of the “Green in Snow” Oriental mustard that I’d grown in a trough this spring. I will probably plant them in early August, to give a steady supply of salad into September and early October. |
 |
