When we moved into our present house I was adamant that I wanted a kitchen garden. It didn’t have one, but with a bit of effort I managed to get family agreement to digging up the part of the lawn area outside my study window. It’s been a great blessing. (See here just a few of the crops we’ve produced from it). And now this makes it possible for me to participate in a practice which has been popular here in England for getting on towards four hundred years. That is, it’s mid-February (2008) and I’m about to sow my tomato seeds.

I suppose those early Spanish conquerors of Peru could not have guessed that their transportation of this red fruit to Europe would result centuries later in a major international food industry and a widespread kitchen gardening hobby. After all, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries many people still believed that tomatoes were poisonous and grew the plants for decoration.

So then, which varieties shall I sow this year. I usually grow a few of the small and juicy Gardener’s Delight, but in recent years I’ve lost a lot of the outdoor plants to blight so am going for a change this year. A couple of years back I grew some Ailsa Craig, which gives a medium-sized fruit with great flavour and although I wouldn’t go so far as to claim that it’s blight-resistant my experience with it then was very good so I’m planning to have some this year in the greenhouse and few outdoors as well.

On the larger side I’m thinking of a return to Costoluto Fiorentino, a great Italian beefsteak variety with fruits anything up to four inches across. At the smaller end of the spectrum I’ve sometimes grown the bush tomato Balconi Red, and the cherry-sized fruits have been beautifully flavoured. Unfortunately, though, I find it such an ugly plant so this year I’m switching back to another bush variety, Garden Pearl, with which I had good success a couple of years ago growing them in plastic troughs with the plants about fifteen inches apart. Moving away now from the red varieties I think I might give blacks a miss this year, but do plan to sow some Golden Sunrise to give a little colour variety to the summer salad plate.

I’ll not turn this into an article about tomato fertilisers, but I’m hoping to experiment a little with fertilising this year. Mind you, nothing quite matches the fruits my grandfather used to produce in the 1950s. Those were the days when the milkman, the coalman and lots of others still delivered their goods from horse-drawn carts. Grandad would be out at any opportunity shovelling up the manure. I never did quite work out what else he put into the mix, but certainly his tomatoes were fed with water from a forty gallon barrel into which had gone great shovels of horse manure, soot from the chimney sweep and who knows what else. Completely unscientific, maybe, but what results! I was only about ten years old at the time, but can still almost taste the fruit as I think about it now.

Just what nutrients I’m going to feed into the compost for my tomato-growing buckets this year I haven’t yet decided. For the time being I’ll focus on the germination stage.

Click here to buy tomato seeds on-line

And here’s a very special guide to tomato growing from Australian authors whose advice has helped both hobbyist and professional tomato growers around the world.

I’ve two main points today, one relating to our general gardening site; the other to our specialist fuchsia site. Gardening-notes.com now has some additional shop pages for (i) Plants and Seeds and (ii) Raised Beds.

As Spring approaches (although given the temperatures these past few days one might be excused for thinking this to be along way off! ) the mind has to turn to seeds. A week or two ago I dug out my small seed trays and propagator, and gave them a good wash. They’re now ready for sowing and placing in my heated propagator cabinet. It’s around this time that I usually sow my tomatoes so as to give them a good start and get an early Summer crop in the greenhouse. I know that many people will have sown their onions at the end of December, especially if there’s any intention of growing for size and exhibiting in the local shows, but mine are simply for transplanting outside in the garden and growing for general family consumption, so about now is OK.

While we’re thinking about the vegetable garden it’s worth mentioning also that we’ve now included a shop section on raised bed equipment. You can, of course, build your own from timber, brick or other materials but many people like to buy ready-made structures so we’ve added this page to point to some useful products. Gardening-Notes.com also has an article on raised bed gardening.

The-Fuchsia-File, our specialist fuchsia site, is steadily growing. I still have to find more photographs to illustrate the various cultivars for which there are separate pages, but the written content is being added without waiting for these. Recent hardy fuchsia additions includes cultivars such as Preston Guild, Army Nurse, Empress of Prussia, Hawkshead and Sleepy.

That’s all for this time/ Enjoy your preparations for the coming Spring.

- David -

When I wrote my blog piece earlier today I did not expect to be writing again tonight.

However, things have moved faster than I expected, and our new page on US gardening magazines has just been uploaded to our bookselling site. This means that both British and North American visitors can now subscribe at very attractive rates to some of the leading gardening periodicals in their parts of the world.

Don’t miss visiting our BrunleaBooks site for:

• UK Gardening Magazines

• USA Gardening Magazines

Subscribe now, and get reading in preparation for the coming gardening season.

- David -

Hello again,

Since last writing here there have been a number of additions to our rapidly increasing mix of gardening resources on the web, and I thought this morning that it was time I listed them here.

On the main Gardening-Notes site there are three new gardening articles:

Fuchsias in Great Variety - a response from a fuchsia enthusiast (myself) to people who claim that fuchsias are boring because they’re “all the same”

Garden Paths - a concise look at the benefits from having good paths around your garden

Safety in the Garden - an important topic, especially as most accidents to individuals happen in home and garden; without becoming paranoid and chasing after an illusory risk-free environment it makes good sense to minimise the dangers which inevitably lurk in our gardens.

Returning to the subject of fuchsias, further varieties and photographs are gradually being added to our new specialist site on fuchsias: the-fuchsia-file. As I think I said in a previous posting on this blog, I did wonder whether to hold this site back until it was in a more finished form, but decided rather to let it grow and develop while on public display. Take a look at what we have so far. By the way, I am still very enthusiastic about the Thompson & Morgan DVD on fuchsias which was given to me by a friend as a Christmas present.

Finally, I’ve revised the UK Garden Magazines page on our BrunleaBooks site, and the US magazines page is almost ready for launch.

That’s all for today,

- David -