As we come to the end of the northern hemisphere growing season tomato growers inevitably have green fruits still on the vine, and need to get them off before the severe frosts arrive. But what to so with them? Scanning a few web sites this morning I came across this great blog post on YouGrowGirl.com and thought I’d share it here.

Preserving Green Tomatoes
The tomato season is ending quickly. As of today, I don’t foresee many more ripe tomatoes coming off of the vine. … In an attempt to squeeze a few more ripe fruit from the harvest I’ve been nestling those that are nearly there inside paper bags. … In my experience, not all green tomatoes will ripen by this method. The fruit that is really young and underdeveloped tends to go wrinkly and rot rather than ripening, so I reserve this process for the tomatoes that have a blush of colour and save the darker green fruit for eating fresh and preserving. …..
>> Read the full article here >>

Canning Tomatoes – video

On a similar theme, but this time red ripe tomsatoes, here’s a video from Anthonys Italian Food. I like his style, down to earth and practical, nothing super-sophisticated; just the kind of presentation most of us can take in.

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Well, gardeners have been warned, here in the North of England, that arctic weather is almost upon us. So that means I’ll need to get outside into the garden and do some physical work. I’ve been shrinking from that for the past few weeks since I bent over carelessly, picked up one of my potato growing bags, and wrenched my back. Now, however, I simply must get out out there.

Last year, before we moved from the East Midlands, I lost even some of my hardiest fuchsias in the coldest winter for decades. This year I don’t plan to repeat the experience. And then there are the less hardy varieties in pots. Having moved to a smaller house, being short of conservatory space, and so far not having re-erected the greenhouse that I so painstakingly dismantled and transported north, I’m having to think hard about the best way to overwinter them. When I’ve worked it out I’ll blog again about this.

Vertical Vegetable Gardening

As I explained in a previous post I now only have ground-level earth in the shade of a high wall so decided to experiment with something I never needed to do before. My experience of this first year of “vertical gardening” has been mixed, even against the south-facing wall. No doubt the lack of sunshine in the mid-summer months had a lot to do with it as even the runner beans were poor but I’m not sure that I’ll try it again, at least not to the same degree. We got a few decent tomatoes, some very miniature peppers, and a couple of courgettes, but overall the vertical kitchen garden experiment was not a success apart from the onions in pots which did very nicely. Down at ground level the potatoes in black plastic bags also produced well as usual but I don’t count them as part of the experiment.

Looking forward to Spring

Down in Nottinghamshire I worked out the best time to plant my tulip bulbs. There it was mid-November. I wonder what will be best here. I’m going to try a month earlier, put them in this week, some in pots, some in an area that does get just a little sun late in the day, and see what happens.

In a new environment what can one do but test and see how things go. Ah well, if anything is going to happen out there today I’d better tear myself away from this keyboard.

Tags: Fuchsias, gardening, vertical garden, winter

The question from the old nursery rhyme came to mind as I sat down to write this morning. Since moving to Cumbria I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that gardening up here among the hills in the Eden Valley is not the same as in the low-lands of the Trent Valley. Nor is working chiefly with containers and surrounded by high walls the same as gardening in an open space with wide lawns.

Some of my experiments with veg in pots have worked fairly well. The runner beans have been fine, onions are doing well, and we’ve had a few courgettes from the two plants that I tried growing vertically against a wall. My main problem with these came when I thought they would have been thoroughly watered by the semingly non-stop torrential rain so didn’t venture outside for a week, only to discover later that the pots were standing in a “rain shadow” and were bone dry while almost everything around them was drowning.

Tomatoes have not been a very good story. I put half a dozen plants of different varieties in large pots against what I thought would be a sun-drenched south-facing wall, theoretically exposed to ten hours a day of good warmth and light. The problem has been that the sun thought differently and decided not to shine very often, so they’ve been growing in the cool. Even so, we’ve had a few nice fruits and I’m still hopeful that more will ripen by the end of this month.

I put the fuchsia photo at the top as a reminder that one of the joys has been my small new collection of fuchsia varieties. The photo here was also an experiment, taken with my camera to see whether I could get a good sharp picture. Not as good as with a “proper” camera, but I’m reasonably pleased with it. I’ll write again with some thoughts on photographing garden plants.

Tags: container gardening, Fuchsias, Tomatoes, Veg in pots