Tag Archives: tomato

Grow, Grow, Grow

I was as excited as any other birdwatcher when I read about the Bearded Vulture that has been spotted in the Peak District and Yorkshire. Also known as a Lammergeier, this is only the second time such a bird has been spotted in Britain this century. Which makes it almost as rare as a Cabinet Minister telling the truth. Or a Special Advisor admitting an error. It is thought that this is a juvenile Lammergeier that has simply got a bit blown off course – admittedly by a few thousand miles. The bird obviously thinks that we still live in a Europe of open borders and no distrust of foreign immigrants. Oh, the naivety of youth.

When I was a naive youth, the Lammergeier was top of my must-see list of birds on the occasions when our family French camping holidays took us to the Pyrenees. We saw lots of other eagles and vultures, but never a Lammergeier. It would be amazing to spot one, but I will not be making the trip to Yorkshire to try and see it. Even without the lockdown restrictions having been lifted (for those of us who abided by them in the first place) I will not be leaving the garden for any of length of time at the moment. Because this is the time of the year when the hard graft finally pays off. It is the time of the year when my parents would say that there was no way they could go on holiday, because the peas will need picking, then the beans, the courgettes and all the other veg that they grew on an industrial scale.

And I now understand their sentiments. The scale of my veg and flower patch is nothing to compare with theirs. Mrs B and I are not interested in the long hours of blanching and bagging veg which my parents engaged in, to enable them to freeze enough greens to see them through the winter. But we currently have more peas, sugar snaps, courgettes, kale, carrots and runner beans and french beans than we could shake a big Tory Lie at. Not to mention salad leaves, cucumbers and, this week, the first tomatoes in the greenhouse.

The sighting of a rare vulture in Britain is a relief from the other depressing news (although it also brought into focus the illegal persecution of birds of prey such as the hen harrier on nearby grouse moors). Being in the garden has also provided solace for me and Mrs B. The flowers are looking particularly fine at the moment and Josh’s Spursy Border is performing far better than I had any right to expect in its first season.

All this has happened not because we made any spurious promises or deadlines, or pretended we had seeds in stock when, in fact we had not. We did not double count plants or make up random straplines like “We will get digging done” or “pick, pick, pick”. No: we just got on with it.

And now, like the Lammergeier in Yorkshire, who must have been a bit tired after its long journey over half of Europe, we will take stock and enjoy the fruits of our labour.

Veronica or Veronicastrum Virginicum?*

img_20180802_092310421
Let ’em Dangle

I read a good article by James Wong in the Grauniad this weekend in which he gave his four top tips for beginners in the garden. I never feel like I have a great well of knowledge about gardening, although I have friends who see me as the expert in gardening, in relative terms that is, because I actually plant stuff, grow stuff and harvest or cut other stuff at the end of the process.  Although I still regard myself as a beginner in this big green-fingered world, reading James Wong’s article made me think that perhaps, in the horticultural educational ladder, I would most probably be in a position to now graduate from beginners’ to improvers classes.

James Wong says persistence is key – to not be put off by things dying on you.  Well, I think I do that.  There have been times when growing veg this summer has felt like a Sisyphean task – as successive batches of chard and peas have perished on the raised bed killing fields like ranks of yeomanry heading over the top to be mown down by slugs, sparrows or simple drought.  But I have rolled that metaphorical rock back up the hill and actually made it stick on occasion to reap the benefits in plentiful courgettes and beans, amongst other things.

Second piece of advice is to avoid worrying about weeds, which are simply flowers int the wrong place.   Using new raised beds has been a real treat this summer, especially with the dry weather so there has been little or no weeding to be done, but I have taken James’s idea to one extreme by allowing some of the random seedlings that emerged from the mudslide of the great greenhouse disaster to flourish in the warm indoor beds.  So I now have a sprinkling of zinnias and Ammi poking through the sweet peppers and tomatoes.  Why not?

Tip number three is simply to plant stuff in the ground and not bother with pots too much.  This is something I could take heed of as I am the worst helicopter parent when it comes to germinating and growing seeds.  I put them in lovingly sieved compost in individual seed trays and then check on them everyday – perhaps every hour – until they are poking through.  Then fuss over them even more watering and watching until they are bursting out of the trays and need to be potted on or planted out.  Then – to my amazement – when let loose from their molly coddled world of shop-bought compost and careful watering, planted out in the naked earth, they flourish.  Like grumpy teenagers living away from home for the first time they suddenly take flight, get on with growing up properly and become sensible members of the community.  So why not sow more seeds direct into the earth?  It might be what they really want.  Perhaps I’ll try that…

And finally Mr Wong advises using Latin names for everything.  Just get out and learn them he says:  no one really knows how Latin – a dead language – should be pronounced so no worries there.  And by using the correct Latin name you can be sure of what you are buying rather than vaguely describing the blue one of this or that flower, you can be pedantically specific.  But as someone whose school coerced him into taking Latin O-Level (My fault: I was one of only a few who actually revised for the exam in the second form) and subsequently scraped a C grade at sixteen (a “4” in today’s exciting GCSE grading), I have never been keen on the language even in horticultural use.   Until recently I would have assumed that streptocarpus was a fish flavoured throat lozenge.  But I will perhaps try the Latin way more often.  Does that include more gesticulation when I speak, suffering wild swings of emotion and using the horn on my car with impunity?  If it makes the broad beans grow, I’ll give it a shot.

I may not have been happy with being made to do latin as a schoolboy, but if things don’t go as planned, it is better to laugh than to cry.   As a latin student might have said of my designated superiors at the last educational establishment I left:

“Eos si iocus non possint pedicabo…”

 

“What a Good Year for the Courgettes…”
Peas in our Time?
The Other Side of Summer
Indoor Zinnias…
…Accidents will Happen
This Year’s Models
Pump it up…Jersey Devil
Tamp the Dirt Down

 

*With apologies to Elvis Costello

The Birds, The Birds

Male-Blackbird-Singing
Blackbird on a wire.  Well, fruit tree actually.

One of my former flatmates had a phobia about birds flapping anywhere near her.  I thought of her recently when we found a jackdaw in the shed when we were clearing out the Old Man’s place the other day.  One of my brothers screamed like a girl when he opened the door and onlookers would have been amused to watch four men in their mid-to-late 50s (I’ll be kind to my eldest sibling) flapping more than the startled bird as it – and they – tried to get out of the door.

Trapped birds seem to be a theme this week, as I found a black bird in the new greenhouse hiding under the basil and tomatoes.  I ushered the relieved bird to the exit and got on with weeding, picking out side shoots and cutting salad.

But then things got more sinister as, in a scene lifted from Hitchcock, I visited the greenhouse a few days later to check on my (now ripening) tomatoes.  The Sweet Millions are my little darlings – they are being produced in burgeoning numbers.  Under my careful direction they are my leading actors in the annual greenhouse summer blockbuster.  But the dismay and horror (the horror!) I felt when I stepped into the greenhouse, like Tippi Hedren into the old farmer’s house, to find a scene of devastation and lying in a corner, behind the basil, the red eviscerated remains of my cherry tomatoes.

Cut to the next scene as, with the symphonic score rising in a crescendo, I ran breathlessly from the scene, unable to scream or even explain what I had witnessed as I got into my old ford truck and drove away.

Ok, so perhaps I over-dramatise.  There were no dead bodies in the greenhouse – it was only a couple of tomatoes that had been eaten.  I was not so upset that I screamed but I did utter an expletive, which Tippi would not have been allowed to do on-screen.  Nor did I  jump into my Ford truck:  the only car in the vicinity was Mrs B’s Honda Civic.  And I probably did discuss the situation with the only sentient being in the vicinity – Ella the Labrador – as I tried to work out what had been eating my tomatoes.

She did not have much to contribute to the discussion.

In retrospect it is obvious, but in the absence of smashed glass, or birds impaled on the windows, it was not entirely clear who was harvesting the tomatoes twenty-four hours prior to me picking them.  It did finally dawn on me later when I saw another blackbird in the greenhouse.  This bird clearly knew exactly how to get in and out, and it’s motivation was obvious as the remains for more nearly ripe toms were left on the soil.

Birds have been a problem this year.  In addition to the usual attacks from pigeons, sparrows have destroyed my pea crop and the blackbirds had also had a good go at the blueberries and raspberries.  So now, in addition to the soft fruit being covered in netting, the greenhouse has netting draped over the roof and door to deter any airborne invasion.

The tomatoes are ripening nicely but I remain wary of flocks of birds gathering on the wires, in the trees, peas or anywhere near the greenhouse.

 

img_20180717_211821252
The evidence

 

 

The Dry

Two weeks ago I started this post.  I don’t know what got in the way of me completing it.  Perhaps it was the end of term which passed in a whir of school trips, successive cover lessons involving repeat showings of Blue Planet or feature films and the year eight boys going mob-handedly feral at lunchtime.  Family matters have also been an issue with Mrs B’s mother slipping from this mortal coil (four days after celebrating her 70th Wedding anniversary).  But the circle of life was shown to be rotating strongly with the graduation of our little girl to the rank of qualified medical practitioner.  That’s a doctor to you or me. (No, not a nurse, nor even a pharmacist.  A proper doctor).

Time is passing so fast these days and yet what I wrote two weeks ago unsurprisingly fits well for now:

*****************

Today I saw the first rumours of hose pipe bans coming into force – though not, thankfully down here in the wet West Country.  Surprisingly, they are talking about the North West being the place they will need to impose the restrictions.  I always thought Manchester and Liverpool got more than their fair share of rain, but then I guess they also have more than their fair share of residents to drink all the water from the tap (like the Tiger Who Came to Tea).

I am not sure how the garden would cope if I were able to water it regularly via a hose pipe.  When I started the garden in the winter, it was chucking down with rain and I was more concerned with drying the clay soil out rather than retaining water.  But regular watering is a fact of life at the moment and the veg have hit their stride.  We now have courgettes, potatoes, green beans, runner beans, mangetout, kale, carrots, onions and shallots.  And we have salad coming out of our ears as well as raspberries and blueberries starting to ripen.

Tomatoes will be in plentiful supply soon, but we’re just waiting for the first sweet million to ripen, then they will all go off like a firework.

Yields have not been as good as I might have expected at the old place, but for a first season on a new plot I feel pretty pleased.

 

French, Runners, carrots, mangetouts, courgettes
Blueberries
Sunflowers – in their element
Greenhouse – peppers, lettuce and toms
Green Millions
Jersey Devil

“Oh The Summertime is Coming..”

IMG_20180421_085807903_HDR.jpg
Amelanchier in bloom – briefly

What a difference a month makes. In the space of what feels like a few brief days we have gone from a cold spring to the heat of midsummer. The Beast from the East has departed, with last month’s snowy downfall trailing in its wake, leaving us basking in warm sun this past weekend.  The grass is greening up and the trees are gently blooming, with Amelanchier blossom been and gone. Mind you, the speed with which the flowers went was mostly down to the impressive thunder-storm we had on Saturday evening which decimated the delicate blooms in one evening downpour.  But the thunder was timely as it meant I did not have to water in the veg patch that I had put together that afternoon.

Of course we know it will not last so I took the opportunity to take a significant step forward in the development of the new garden as I tried to get a lot of “done”.  On Friday the rotavator was delivered back to our place.  In a neat trick to avoid requesting favours of friends with trailers I asked the good mower man to collect the machine from one address, service it, then return it to another.

The Howard 350 Rotavator was one of the first things the parents bought when the Old Garden was being cultivated.  It is a legendary piece of equipment and still gets the job done over forty years later.  As a teenager I struggled to keep control of the beast and I was never too happy using it as TOM or my siblings were always likely to cast a critical eye over my efforts.  Maturity should lend some confidence to how I go about things now, but I was still a little self-conscious about trying to control the machine as I drove it onto the front garden. Saying I drove it suggests I was in charge.  It still feels to me as if it has a mind of its own, moving along like an old prop forward mindlessly trundling forward with little awareness of me trying to steer it.  It certainly draws attention to itself, sounding like a large tractor, and the clutch has a tendency to whine and slip.  And I had also forgotten how the prongs make the machine lurch alarmingly forward if they hit hard ground – and there was plenty of that underneath the lawn I was digging up.  I eventually crisscrossed the proposed potato bed six times trying to break up the clay soil, ending up with a collection of hashed lawn, earth and clay marbles.

Afterwards I drove it towards the entrance to the back garden, knocking through the latch as the clutch slipped and the beast nearly took the gate off its hinges.  But the job was done.

The next morning Richard arrived with a trailer load of compost.  A ton of compost does not go far, but it is a start.  And I was finally able to spend my Saturday afternoon planting  onions, shallots and potatoes.

Just in time to be watered in by the cacophanous downpour.

Potatoes in
The Beast resting after its work
Sweet Peas
Squashes
First Courgettes
“Salad Days are coming…”
Cav Nero already potted with Toms, Basil et al, behind
Magpies – the ruination of many small birds’ nests

Green Shoots

Back to a new term and the new garden as we prepare to put my father to rest on Monday.

Potting Shed being put to use

It has, of course, been a strange time – the combination of funeral arrangements, sorting The Old Man’s estate and domestic affairs, combined with family matters has kept me occupied through the latter part of the holidays. Having a six-day break in Arran was a much-needed breather and by driving eight hours north we also found far better weather than the West of England enjoyed.

We are now at school in at what is amusingly labelled the summer term. It would have been nice to have had a few days in the garden in the latter half of the hols, but the rain has been incessant and in one of the few dry intervals when I tried to cut the grass, the mower broke.  Getting the garden under control does is not coming easily.

Still, I am glad I made the investment in the greenhouse allowing me to plant plenty of seed trays.  The potting shed is coming into its own with the last surviving hen keen to help out on occasion.  Everything is late, but we finally have some tomato seedlings poking through as well as Cavolo Nero, cabbages and PSB.  I thought we had some chillis up, but they turned out to be mushrooms. Not what I was expecting at all.  They grew one day, died the next.  Hey ho.  Might need to look at a different brand of potting compost.

On the upside, the potatoes are looking well chitted and are more than ready to get into the ground. The down side being that I have not been able to prepare any beds in the waterlogged clay soil.  I have the frames for the raised beds, but no compost or topsoil to go in them.  That’s a plan for another week.

Help wanted?
One small tomato for man..

 

Put your back into it

June Rose
June Rose

 

Back in mid June I suffered the ultimate gardening injury – a slipped disc.  Well, strictly speaking I understand it to be a herniated disc.  I wasn’t even gardening – I had simply been doing some house work in the flat, leaned across a table to straighten a piece of paper on the mantle piece and it felt like a piece of my back simply tore.  It was agony, though the next day it was not the back that hurt as much as my leg which felt like it had been hit repeatedly with a rounders bat.  I never realised this was what sciatica felt like.

So I was off gardening duties, but the same week the annual open day for Galhampton gardens took place.  We paid our monies and took our choice of the horticultural delights that the villagers wanted to display.  It was an interesting meander through gardens which ranged from little more than one herbaceous border and a lot of grass to others that had every last square centimetre prepped and planted with complimentary veg and flowers.  Others were open seemingly just to display their birds or their model railway.  It was an eclectic mix.

No Tomatoes
No Tomatoes

The one recurring theme that seemed to cause angst with Mrs B was the size of most people’s tomatoes.  Paddi’s already had good-sized fruit in June, while ours were only just ready to planted out, and other gardeners were seemingly about harvest a bumper crop when we made our grand tour.  Beware gardening envy – it is the green fingered monster that doth mock the peat on which it feeds.   Covetousness enveloped us as we viewed other tomatoes and devoured our horticultural self-respect as we ambled through in the warm June sunshine.

But when we got back to the garden we realised (or rather Mrs B accepted) that there were still plenty of good things in our patch that commended our piece of ground to us.  Like the mature trees such as the amelanchier and the bean tree, or the established herbaceous borders that we love so much or the more recent extension to the boomerang bed which we were hoping would come up strong with a range of perennials

Husband and wife back together again – with a tentative hug of unity (careful with the back dear).

 

 

 

We should label things

Sprouting brocoli.

Peter Cook and Dudley Moore had – as their alter egos Derek and Clive – an expletive-laden conversation regarding the lack of labelling on important household items (such as motorbikes and sunglasses – getting them mixed up can be awkward, it seems) and I often find myself reciting the lines in my head as I go around the garden looking at rows of green stuff sprouting up, trying to remember what they are or how I should be harvesting / nurturing them.

The brocoli we planted is sprouting nicely, though not in one big head.  As these are the plants that Lynn gave to us we are not too sure what type they are, so I am second guessing what to do.  Perhaps they are “cut and come again” brocoli which I can just take off florets and more grow.  But they are just the size of purple sprouting and at the moment we don’t get much of a meal from them.

How ripe is my tomato?

The tomatoes are another issue – I have been patiently waiting for the first one to ripen to its full red bloom, only to discover that this type are naturally orange in colour and will not turn red.  Change the label to orange tomato.

Mind you, even with a label and instructions, life does not always work out.  My coriander seeds which the packet told me would take something stupid like a matter of hours between sowing and harvesting, have taken months to only produce three pathetic seedlings.  It don’t always do what it says on the tin.

One row of potatoes – spot the difference

And even when your plants do well, you cannot always be sure what you will harvest.   Lynn kindly provided us with a whole host of different chitting spuds, from Belle de Fontenay second earlies to Sarpo Mira Main Crop.  I carefully planted each type in its own row and assiduously labelled each one accordingly.  What soon became apparent when the spuds came up was that they were not necessarily uniform rows: the tops were clearly different, and since the destruction of the plants by blight, I havent’ a clue what I am going to find.  This week we dug several roots of potatoes that are like no other we have planted – so while one root is clearly Setana, the next is bright red – maybe Duke of Yorks?  Who knows.  But it brings even more excitement to an otherwise mundane task fo digging spuds.

As Derek and Clive said “If people would label things…you’d know where you were”.

Trail of destruction – the snails didn’t read the label either…

Don’t Say What You See

Send My Regards to Broad Beans…

Prince Charles has been ridiculed in the past for his admission that he talks to his plants to encourage growth.  Looking over my desolated veg patch this week, if HRH had had a look he could have been forgiven for thinking that I might have been saying rather nasty things to my plants.  The broad beans are black and increasingly wizened, and the potatoes, with nothing above ground, now look like Iron Age long barrows, awaiting grave robbers to dig up the treasure within.   If anyone has been talking to these plants, it would probably have been someone from the John Terry school of elocution.  What might pass for “banter” on the professional football pitch would definitely be banned in the allotment.

Admittedly, the more banal explanation for the sorry state of the beans (and spuds) will be the weather – in particular the position of the jet stream which is doing its very best to break every precipitation record in the book this summer.  But talk of the weather is also banned in our house.  Claire has been threatening to put a sign up in the bookshop to warn potential customers that “yes – we know it is raining outside, that it has been a crap summer and we too are fed up with it.  But most of all we are fed up with every single (JT expletive deleted) customer telling us this”.

The other reason we are not discussing the weather in our house is because our Silver Wedding Celebration is planned for this Saturday – in the garden.  Jim told me yesterday that he thought that we should be OK this week-end, and coming from a man who has spent his life working outdoors on farms, I was heartened to hear an expert opinion on the subject.  Unfortunately, he undermined this voice of authority by saying “well that was what it said on the ‘Countryfile‘ forecast”.  AAAhhhh…. that’ll be same TV programme we watch on Sundays – a glossy magazine of picture postcard farming for city dwellers who think cows are the size of a large dog (genuine overheard conversation that one) where the rare breed piglets on Adam’s Farm get a little sun cream on the ears to prevent burning.

No that does not inspire great confidence, so we are not trying too hard to guess the size of the next weather front and are avoiding false hopes and discussion about high pressure over England this week-end.

But in the absence any weather to discuss, what can we Brits talk about?

Parsnips just keeping their heads above water

Well, I reckon second on the list, is gardening, so a quick resume of what’s growing on in the borders.  Well, Claire planted out the Sweet Williams and I put the parsnips out.  Both now look rather sodden and sad, but are surviving.  The Heritage Peas have grown magnificently – straight and tall.  Unfortunately, they forgot to flower, so there are five feet of leafy, spindly growth, with six inches of flowering plant on top.  So a couple of handfuls of peas are the best we can hope for.  But only if the bees are able to get out and pollinate, but they are seemingly hive-bound because of – you guessed it – the weather.

The pigs are happy as….well pigs in mud really.  They have discovered that if they dig deep enough they can get to the roots of the blue cedar.  The other morning I discovered them up to their shoulders shovelling away with their snouts – looking intent on digging a tunnel out of there.  Perhaps they are trying to escape this crap weather.  When they ask for a wooden horse for practising their gymnastics I will start to worry.

They are managing to keep themselves busy with rootling around amid signs that they are getting adolescent urges as the smaller puny pig keeps trying to mount his larger brother.  Some sex education might be in order here, but in a blog that is intended to be read by the whole family, I think we will leave it there.  To paraphrase from last week’s court case: he’s a rutting ginger runt.

Elsewhere sex education is also in short supply with the hens who are laying three eggs per day, but Sydney the Speckled  Sussex has been broody for weeks.  Sydney clearly does not understand that however long she sits on those eggs, they ain’t gonna hatch.

But then again, perhaps it’s not the eggs that make her stay indoors – perhaps she too is just fed up with the WEATHER.

But we’re not going to mention that are we?  Just try not to comment on the bleeding obvious.

An Orange glow in the greenhouse…
Is it the sun?
No: just the first tomato trying to ripen.