Pages

Friday 6 April 2012

Tomatoes galore

It's time for me to think about my allotment, I previously posted an item about how I plan my allotment and organise things.
But now it's time to get down to the nitty gritty getting dirty.
Well, I should say that I've not left it until Good Friday to start the work, oh no I've been busy pottering away, weeding, preparing beds at the allotment and doing a bit of planting at home, I've got a 5ft lean-to plastic greenhouse on the back of my garage, we've got adjustable shelves in there and it's currently loaded with seedlings.
The back bedroom (recently skimmed, painted & due for a new carpet next week) is home to our tomatoes.
I go for a cherry type tomato (sungold), a plum type (inca, 1st time growing this yr) and a juicy salad type tomato. And for the last few years I've not had to buy these ones.  I've had my own "greek style" and "spanish style"
You see, in 2009 I went to Greece on holiday, enjoyed the sun, sailing and salads, particularly greek salads made with beautifully sweet, juicy, fat tomatoes. If you saw me on holiday, in a restaurant, you might have noticed me picking seeds out of some of the tomatoes wondering what I was doing. Well, once the seeds were wrapped in a napkin & transferred back home I carefully washed them and dried them out on kitchen roll. And planted them here, first at home, then transferred to a greenhouse in the North east, about 1mile from St Mary's Lighthouse. And they grew, nice big fat juicy tomatoes, in a bush habit (not cordon).
When I went to Spain, I thought I'd try it again, and it worked. So for the last 3yrs I've had these unknown holiday varieties of tomatoes that are fabulous in salads.
I decided that this year the "greek" and "spanish" seeds would probably be too old and not germinate, and decided to plant them all in my heated propagator. But actually most of them germinated and I've got quite a few, including my Sungold and Inca, 39 to be exact. I can only house about 15 in my greenhouse!
I need to offload a fair few.

1 comment:

  1. I love that you're growing tomatoes. I tried (and failed miserably) last year. I can grow lots of green leaves really well but no actual tomatoes that look edible! I spent an entire day planting all the seeds I owned recently. Keeping everything crossed for beetroot, spinach and various herbs this time around. :)

    ReplyDelete