Summer ain't over yet, after all!

Much to my surprise, our strawberries are still going strong, and I picked a large bowlful of them today, including one absolute whopper. Will have to make sure we eat those tonight, as they go mouldy very quickly (which I found out with the last bowlful I picked).

I also found a couple of small but perfectly formed Green Zebra tomatoes, my first all season, and a good few almost-red Early Girls. I'm taking the tomatoes in before they're red, just in case we get hit by an early frost or a downpour of rain that's going to make them swell up and split.

Oh, and I found a lovely ripe Chocolate Beauty capsicum in the conservatory, so that has been added to today's harvest as well!

Summer is nearly over

The weather has been getting cooler, and we're forecast to have temperatures of 2c (just above freezing) tonight, so I think our garden won't be producing its summer goods for much longer.

Cucumbers are still arriving thick and fast, and we have more than we know what to do with. We've harvested 12.5kg of cucumber so far and there are lots more on the plants in various stages of development. Not bad at all for about three square feet of bed space! Of course they have totally overrun their trellis now and are sprawling into the neighbouring bok choy and all over the path, but that's not a huge problem.

Tomatoes didn't do well this year at all. It's only now that we're getting green ones appearing, and I really don't have much hope of those getting the chance to ripen before the first frost arrives. I've gathered a handful of Golden Nuggets, three Aunt Ruby's German Greens, three or four Better Boys, six Black Krim (none of which I got to taste - they were badly split after being overwatered by accident), four Juliets, and maybe a dozen Moneymakers. Oh, and one single Red Pear. The rest of them - Green Zebra, Black Tula, Sungold, Brandywine Red, Cherry Sweetie, and Baxter's Early Bush - haven't produced a single ripe tomato yet. In fact a couple of the plants never grew more than a foot tall! If it wasn't for the Early Girls we'd have had hardly any tomatoes at all this year.

I've done a ruthless clear-out of any tomato plants in the conservatory that don't have flowers on them, and the indoor Early Girls that are persistently producing tiny, tough-skinned fruit (could be a fertiliser issue but it's too late in the season now to fix it). I intend doing the same outdoors, and after that I'll take stock. I know that this year has been a bad one for tomato growers all over the country, so the poor harvest hasn't put me off trying. At least I got to try my first ever green tomato! I will definitely be growing Aunt Ruby's German Green again next year, as they were just delicious. I'll grow Better Boy again too.

We did have a good haul of peppers this year compared to last year. Even the outdoor ones are producing well, although they're still green and therefore quite bitter. Indoors we got a few chocolate peppers and a good crop of sweet banana peppers, so I'll be growing more of those indoors next year too. I didn't have much luck with ordinary capsicums indoors but that's possibly down to the size of their (teeny tiny) tubs. Will try larger ones next year.

Hmmm, what else went well? We were thrilled with the huge amount of sweetcorn we got from our 12 squares of corn plants. Lettuce grew well, and there's more bok choy than we need. Red onions did great (I've pulled about half of them and will pull the rest at the weekend, now that the tops have fallen over on them). We've got a great crop of gherkins on the go, and I'm still getting a handful of strawberries every couple of days.

My potatoes-in-bags experiment didn't work so well. I harvested the whole lot of them a couple of days ago, resulting in about 1.5kg of spuds not much larger than marbles. They didn't have much growing medium and were rather neglected as far as watering went, but I'm not sure whether that was the only problem or if the weather/location/seed potato choice also played a part. Will try again next year, but with larger containers and better watering.

Our pumpkin and butternut squash plants are only flowering now. Since the supermarkets are now full of pumpkins for sale at low prices, I have to assume that ours should have been ripe by this stage. Bah. The courgettes are way behind too - we just have one courgette between three plants so far, and it's not even fully grown yet.

That's enough for now. I'm going to tackle the garden at the weekend and give the whole thing a bit of a clean-up, then see what I should be planting for the winter. It's all good.

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.

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.

Tomato change of plan

Much to my disappointment, the three Green Zebra tomato plants are failing to thrive. I planted one of these outside at the end of October (probably a bit early, in fairness) and one at the end of November, and they haven't grown at all. A third one was planted on the deck and it's doing a little better, but the two in the garden are a bust. Can you even see the poor little scrap of green just above the marigold flower in this photo?

Given how much better most of the other tomato plants are doing, and how many I have still languishing in little seedling pots in the conservatory, I think the Green Zebras have got to go. It's disappointing, but I'd rather have something else than realise halfway through the summer that I'm not going to get any fruit. My garden has no space for plants that don't pay their way in some form or other, be it pretty flowers or something to put on the dinner plate. There's a Sungold and a Cherry Sweetie that'll do nicely in those spots, I think, so it's time to plant them out!

Got my first ripe tomato

Today had cause for celebration - as I was watering the tomato plants in the conservatory I found the first red one of the season!

I ate it straight away - a couple of slices went straight into my mouth (still warm from the sunshine, delicious) and the rest went into a ham sandwich. My verdict: perfect.

The indoor plants

It occurred to me that I haven't blogged much about the indoor plants. We are lucky enough to have a fairly large conservatory (it would feel a lot larger if it didn't have a hulking great defunct spa bath taking up most of the floor space, but we just have to work around that until we have the money to get it ripped out and the floor rebuilt) with glass on three sides and a clear plastic roof, so it is very bright and sunny in there. For the last few months it has been my greenhouse as I planted seeds and pampered seedlings.

Right now it is home to 17 pepper plants, eight tomato plants, a tub of lettuce, a small lime tree, and a number of seedings and germinating tomato seeds.

 

Most of the tomato plants are very small still, but the Early Girls have lots of flowers and a good number of baby tomatoes on them so I have high hopes of an early harvest.

It's coming into summer and the weather is warming up, so it gets very hot in the conservatory during the day, and it won't be long before it's too hot for the tomatoes in there. I'm moving some of them out onto the deck to see how they fare.

The green tubs are great, aren't they? They are relics from before Christchurch got a wheelie bin system for rubbish and recycling, and we got them all for free. They've got built-in handles and drainage holes and are a really good size for planting things into while still being light enough to lift.We've got seven of them so far and I'm still scouting around for more.

Mmmm, strawberries

The garden's going great. I just gathered a bowlful of strawberries for dessert:

There are lots more ripening on the plants outside.

 The broccoli is enormous, taking over the whole bed and dwarfing the poor little tomato plants in the back.

 

The silverbeet has grown completely out of control and I doubt it's fit for us to eat now - it's going to seed - but the chickens will enjoy the leaves.

 The sweetcorn and purple beans are getting there, slowly but surely.

And the onions and leeks are doing well too.

Even the spuds are coming along nicely in their plastic bags of compost (as are the weeds running rampant behind them).

We have had almost no weeding to do in the raised beds, which is fantastic - weeds only grow in the soil that we haven't yet levelled and covered with weed mat. The only problem so far is that the plants (broccoli and spinach) in one of the beds are not thriving, and some weird fungus has been growing in that soil. I think there was something funny about the compost we put in that one, but unfortunately I have no idea what it was. It's annoying, and honestly I am not terribly keen on eating anything that comes out of that bed because I'm not sure what it's growing in. Fortunately I do no not eat green leafy vegetables anyway so I don't have to worry about it right now!

The good and the bad

The good:

• there are green tomatoes on both the indoor and outdoor Early Girl plants
• most of my other tomato seeds are germinating quite well
• the strawberries starting to ripen in the beds outside (and in fact I just ate the first one - yum!)
• the potatoes in their plastic bags are growing nicely, and I'm particularly taken with the purple ones, which turned out to have purpley-green leaves as well
  

The bad:

• my Roma tomato seedlings all baked to death, in the conservatory on an unexpectedly hot day
• the lemon tree has shed almost all of its leaves, and will have to be planted outside somewhere - anywhere! - before it expires completely
• something has chewed holes in a lot of the lettuce leaves
• we still haven't finished ripping out the weeds from the veggie garden and putting down the last of the weed matting, so I have no new photos

Maybe this weekend we'll get to grips with the last of it. I will update if we do!

Our tomato plans

I love tomatoes. Really, really love tomatoes. I would eat them every day if they were more affordable out of season, but this summer I plan to indulge myself until I’m sick of the things.

Last year we were complete novice gardeners and made many mistakes, but we were still blessed with an abundance of the aforementioned red fruit. Since we were just getting our feet muddy, so to speak, we went for varieties that were common and readily available; Moneymaker, an heirloom variety with smallish round red fruit, Cherry Sweetie, a cherry tomato, and a couple of sorry no-name specimens rescued from the brink of death courtesy of The Warehouse’s garden centre for 50c each. Despite our ignorance and occasional neglect, these plants somehow thrived and gave us a great harvest right up to the start of winter when the first frosts arrived.

This year I’m ready to experiment a little more – actually, a lot more. I could well be setting myself up for a fall, but I’m going to plant sixteen tomato varieties and see how they turn out. Here are the details (photos all from the internet, hopefully to be replaced with my own when something grows!).

Beefsteak/Paste Tomatoes
Aunt Ruby’s German Green

Aunt Ruby’s German Green is a beautiful green beefsteak with vivid green and gold centres, weighing up to 500g each. It’s recommended for sandwiches and for fried green tomatoes.



Brandywine Red

This is a beefsteak tomato with a sweet rich tomato flavour, and is recommended for sandwiches.



Roma

These are the tomatoes that you find in tins, ready for cooking. We’re planting four of these plants in the hopes that we get enough to make our own tomato sauce for the winter.



Black Tula

A Russian heirloom tomato, this one has mahogany red skin with green shoulders and dark green gel around the seeds. Ugly but, by all accounts, delicious. I've never tried a black tomato, but they are described as having a sweet, spicy, smoky taste.


Mid-Sized Tomatoes
Early Girl

These round red fruits are perfect for slicing, and have excellent texture and flavour.











Better Boy

These large fruits are plump, juicy, and deep red.





Green Zebra

When this one is fully ripe, the fruits are bright green with stripes of lighter green.





Moneymaker

Another heirloom tomato with mid-sized round red fruit. We grew this one last year and it was surprisingly prolific despite being underfed and probably underwatered.


Cherry Tomatoes

Sweetie

We grew these ones last year and were very happy with them – bunches of sweet cherry tomatoes in what almost looked like a blister-pack arrangement, as if somebody in a factory had arranged them that way. Delicious.











Yellow Pear (and matching Red Pear)

Charming little yellow (and red) pear-shaped cocktail tomatoes.



Sungold

Sungold is an English hybrid with super-sweet cherry sized fruits, perfect for eating straight off the plant. They are a golden orange when ripe.



Juliet

These sweet grape-sized tomatoes are recommended for salad.




Sugar Plum

This grape shaped variety produces large red clusters of fruit with exceptional flavour.




Gold Nugget

These round golden tomatoes, one inch in diameter, are sweet, seedless, and ideal for salad.



Baxter’s Early Bush Red

These orange-red salad tomatoes are a cherry type and keep for up to a month in the fridge.




That’s the lot – for now, anyway. And really we don’t have space for any more varieties this year – I’ll be restricted to just one each of most of these as it is. But we’ve got high hopes of a good tomato harvest if I can persuade all the seeds to germinate and grow up healthy and strong, enough for both of us at least and hopefully enough to share as well. I’ll keep you updated!

Germinating like crazy

Sorry for the lack of updates recently, but that does not indicate a lack of progress. The weather isn't settled enough to plant much outside yet, but in the conservatory I have many little seeds germinating quite happily. Here's what I have growing indoors:

• tomatoes (Better Boy, Early Girl, Green Zebra, Moneymaker)
• peppers (California Wonder, Yellow Banana, Purple Beauty, Chocolate Beauty)
• sweetcorn
• lettuce
• cucumber
• and a variety of flowers, including gilia, cornflower, larkspur, swan plants, and many others that I've currently forgotten.

There are seed potatoes waiting for the current wet weather to pass before I plant them in bags outside:

• Purple Heart
• Ilam Hardy
• Red Rascal
• Agria
  

Planted outside are some slightly hardier crops:

• red onions
• leeks
• spring onions
• radishes
• lettuce
• strawberries
• raspberries
• broccoli
• spinach
• silverbeet

Those last two belong to my husband, who has his own beds to look after this year. I am taking the very organised pre-planned approach, and he's taking the approach of, "Plant what seems like a good idea at the time, wherever it fits," so it'll be interesting to see which of us produces better food!

I also spent about $80 setting out the start of our irrigation system. It'll cost us maybe the same again to finish it, but that should make things a lot easier for us this summer. The system won't cover all the plants but it'll cover the raised beds and leave the neighbours with a lot less to water for us if we go away for a weekend here and there!

Of course, not all the vegetables will fit in the raised beds, not by a long shot. I'm going to need at least eight tubs for some of the tomatoes and all the peppers. We had no luck with peppers last year because it wasn't quite warm enough for them, so I'm going to keep those in the conservatory and see if that improves things. Just need to find the space for them first!