Changes

The butter beans have baby bean pods on them! And one of the outdoor peppers has a little pepper growing. There are tiny green tomatoes on several of the outdoor tomato plants, too - Roma, Bloody Butcher, and something I haven't got a name for. Possibly a Moneymaker.

The indoor tomatoes are looking unhappy (limp and mottled) and my research indicated that they might be suffering from mites. I bought some Tomato Dust and have given them all a liberal coating, so I hope that helps. And the three huge tomatoes on the Black Krim were too much for the plant to hold and the whole stem ripped right off. I have them on the windowsill now and one of the tomatoes has ripened to a gratifying pink colour, so maybe I'll still get to eat them, but it's hardly an ideal solution. If that plant produces any more fruit I'll have to find some way of rigging up a support so this doesn't happen again.

Harvest totals

Harvest total update:
tomatoes (all Early Girl so far): 2168g
strawberries: 4199g
carrots: 471g
potatoes: 113g
raspberries: 41g
spring onions: 80g
cucumber: 665g

That's almost eight kilos of produce so far, not counting the vast amount of broccoli that was eaten without being weighed. I'm happy.

Is this tomato normal?

This is the underside of a Black Krim tomato, and I've got no idea if this is normal or not. I've never grown this variety before but I seem to remember reading somewhere that it can be very ugly (or maybe that was the Black from Tula that I'm thinking of). If this is just routine tomato ugliness then I can live with it, but I don't want to waste time and energy on a plant that's diseased.All four tomatoes on this plant have the same issue to a degree but this one is definitely the worst.

A friend suggested that it might be blossom end rot, but I don't really think so. It's dry and clean, not mushy or bad-looking in any way. If anybody reading this knows how Black Krims are meant to look, please post and let me know!

Some things growing, some things dying

I ripped three tomato plants out of their tubs today. They were diseased-looking, with yellow leaves and soft stems, and the tomatoes weren't how they should have been on the two Early Girls. They were smaller than cherry tomato sized in the most part, and tough as old boots. Only the chickens would eat them.

The third plant was a Moneymaker which had lost almost all its leaves. It was starting to flower at the very top, but it looked awful and I didn't hold out much hope for a good crop from it (certainly not compared to the Moneymaker in the conservatory, which is covered in green fruit at the moment). I think the chickens did a lot of damage at the bottom of the plant, but it was right beside the Early Girls and may have got whatever they had. It's in the bin too, now.

On the plus side, I've got green tomatoes on the Black Krim, Betterboy, and Aunt Ruby's German Green plants inside, and green peppers too! Banana peppers and capsicums, hurrah. Can't wait till they ripen.

 

The climbing beans outside are flowering, and clinging very nicely to the sweetcorn.

And there are millions of apples (probably no exaggeration) on the big old tree at the bottom of the garden.

The strawberries have slowed down a bit but are still producing, and it won't be long before the red onions are ready to pull. They look huge but the tops are still green and show no signs of going to seed so I should probably leave them a bit longer.

A photographic garden update

The indoor tomatoes are growing really tall (and wilting in the heat despite the copious amounts of water they get):

There are little green peppers on several of the pepper plants - this one is a Chocolate Beauty which should turn brown when ripe:

The cucumbers are starting to produce fruit:

Green beans wind their way up the netting:

The sweetcorn has pollen on top and silks below:

The remaining broccoli has all been ripped up and fed to the chickens (they LOVE it) and we have a few empty-looking beds at the moment:

But never fear, there are things planted in most of those empty squares. Sorry-looking wind-battered peppers, tiny tomatoes, seeds for basil, carrots, and muk chow, seedlings for purple cabbage and purple sprouting broccoli, and also a couple of pumpkins and a butternut squash. It looks bare right now but I hope it'll fill out over coming weeks.

Got our first cucumber

I wasn't sure how to tell when cucumbers are ready to pick, since I've never picked one in my life before, but I looked online and apparently they're good to go when they're 20cm long. We had one that seemed big enough (photographed here with sunglasses for size reference) so I nabbed it off the plant. We haven't eaten it all yet but my husband and I both had a slice and it tasted great. I'm really excited about having more of these over the coming months.

I have been keeping track of our harvest totals (the cucumber was 210g, by the way) but the spreadsheet isn't on the computer that I'm writing with right now so I can't update you all. I'm sure that's terribly upsetting. Rest assured that we've been getting lots of strawberries (I made two more jars of jam today) and quite a few tomatoes too.

The size of many of the Early Girl tomatoes is a bit disappointing. They aren't much larger than cherry tomatoes and have quite a thick skin, so they're not very nice to eat in one mouthful. There are some larger ones which are very tasty when sliced, but I'm not sure what to do with the small ones. It seems wasteful to throw them away, but I don't particularly want to eat them and they're too small to skin for cooking.

There are large green tomatoes on the Black Krim and on the Better Boy, and some smaller ones on the Moneymaker (and those are pear shaped, which makes me wonder if it's a Moneymaker after all), so I'm impatiently awaiting a taste of those ones. The Early Girls are well worth it just to have tomatoes at the start of the season, but I want more than what they're offering right now.