It's all about the tomatoes

In our opinion  anyone who doesn't like tomatoes just hasn't found the one for them, it's a bit like our view on Champagne.

Paul's favourite is the Striped Cavern, which hasn't ripened yet. This is a hollow tomato (?!) for stuffing, John M is distinctly unimpressed with the concept. Faye loves the sweetness of the Sungold, Natasha is a big fan of the beefsteaks stuffed with mince and Emma's favourite is the San Marzano (as eulogised about on the Blog eearlier this year).

The tomatoes in our visitor greenhouse are grown hydroponocally (without soil). The harvests are much bigger and everything fruits much sooner, so we always have plenty to share. 

Quick Photo shoot

May is my favourite month in the greenhouse because it's full of promise with plenty of tomatoes and chillies setting, but I can still manage to manouvere around to take photos. Come July the yoga moves come in very handy to try to get whole plants in shot without tumbling over the tomatoes!

Anyway, here are a few photos.

Chillies are set - just in time for Southport Chilli Festival

Hooray - we already have chillies in fruit and it's only May 12th!

The first to set are the Hungarian Wax, we've never grown them before - I know it's obvious from the name, but they reallly do feel waxy. I'm going to have to dig out a recipe for them. At the moment the fruit are a very 1980s yellow/green (surely you can see that it's reminiscent of 80s socks, or is it just me?)

We're taking part in the Southport Chilli Festival on Friday and we'll be taking along our young chillies to inspire shoppers to grow their own instead of relying on the limited range available in most supermarkets and grocers.

Sweet, sweet, sweetcorn

They say there is nothing sweeter tasting than sweetcorn plucked from the garden and popped on a BBQ. They say you should run from the garden to the BBQ to retain as much of the sugar in the corn as possible (it starts turning into starch in just 24hours). And they say there is no going back once you've tasted super-fresh sweetcorn. So, we simply had to plant some up.

We planted 4 young sweetcorn plants in two of the raised beds this week (8 plants in total). Sweetcorn is best planted in a square or a block configuration to give the male flowers at the top of the plant a better chance of shedding pollen on the female tassels below, so that's what we've done.

We're hoping that each plant will produce two cobs. They are ready to harvest when the tassles turn brown, but to check you can twist a kernel off, if it's milky it's ready - run to the BBQ!

I'm alredy thinking that if it really is as good as everyone says we are going to give all the raised beds over to sweetcorn, or take over next door!

A few more sweetcorn tips
Plant in May
It needs full sun and shelter from strong winds.
Sweetcorn hates clay and it will develop deep roots so it much prefers a deeply dug bed. 

Potatoes without the digging

I knows that lots of people associate potatoes with digging, but as our raised beds are at the office, none of us wanted to have to do too much digging, so we're using a Potato Grow Pot. The potatoes were placed in the planter and covered with compost on DATE. Today the leaves were already 12cms above this first layer and it was time to add an extra layer and more compost.

After initial concerns about growing potatoes above ground we're converted. This really is a superb way of growing potatoes on a patio - so simple and clean.

Unfortunately we have no idea what variety we planted because the person we sent to buy the seed potatoes (they shall remain nameless because we're nioce like that) can't remember what they bought!
Top gardening tip - write it down!

We're hoping for potatoes by DATE, we'll let you know the variety then.