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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.
