Wednesday 25 March 2020

Cleaning Up the Tomato Patch

Out with the old, in with the new

Lots of different varieties in a small patch of garden

As autumn advances we are transitioning our crops in the ground. I decided it was time to pull up the tomatoes in the front yard so I could prepare the scene for our garlic patch. We had quite a few different types of tomatoes planted this year thanks to the lady around the corner in Allison Street who sells an incredible variety of seedlings each Spring. The growing season wasn't great this year but we got our plants in early thanks to an unusually warm October, so our crop was actually fairly reasonable.
Although there were still quite a few tomatoes that hadn't started ripening I didn't want to leave some of the plants in the ground as they would get in the way of cleaning up the whole area in one go. After collecting the fruit that was still hanging in there I thought that they looked quite attractive so took this photo. As I am typing, Dianne is chopping the green ones up to use in Green Tomato Relish. Of the others, some are ready to eat now and the rest will ripen up on the kitchen bench.

Out the back, I have got another section of ground ready for potatoes to go in when I can get the seed potatoes in a couple of weeks. We've got lots of greens coming along nicely and will put in some other winter crops once I've got a bit more weeding and cleaning up done. We have a couple more aubergines ripening and we still hold out hope that a few more fruit will set.

I hope you are all looking after yourselves in the "Time of CoronaVirus", eating well and maintaining your mental, social and physical health. Being out in the garden is sure one nice way to do just that.

Update:

And here's the result of 1.1 kgs of green tomatoes ... 3 jars of relish!

Di's homemade green tomato relish
PS: We do actually have two more thriving tomato plants out the back, which were stuck in the ground much later than normal. The seedlings came from our friend Anne Parrott; the variety is "Bulls Balls"! Here's a photo of them in situ:

Bulls Balls?
There aren't a huge number of tomatoes on these two plants but the ones that got going early are ... HUGE! About a dozen and a half are hidden away amongst the foliage fairly low down, with some smaller ones having emerged higher up just recently. If we get a good late warm spell they might just get to be huge too! Oftentimes we can harvest tomatoes right up until late May or even early June. We're supposed to have a warmer than normal autumn, which will be welcome after a fairly ordinary summer. And it looks like we will have a nice little late harvest of sandwich-sized tomatoes to go on with.