As the weather is becoming little colder at ends of the day and damper too – this weekend have emptied our small tunnel and wooden greenhouse of tomato plants and washed down the floor and glass to try and drive away resident small spiders and snails looking for somewhere nice to overwinter. im sure they’ll be back. Some years we have had problems with scary hairy black caterpillars and blossom end rot – no caterpillars this year and watered regularly – so blossom end rot not too bad.
Tomatoes germinate well from seed (indoors on window ledge) and big seedlings – easy to transplant into own small pots and then final big ones – not so much to do – except disbud them otherwise your greenhouse will turn into a jungle. We trail twine from a wire running across the greenhouse roof, and the other end wound round the stem a few times – to guide them upwards and to avoid using canes
We potted them up in own compost and fed them with comfrey as they flowered and on past advice of my dad, took away most of the lower leaves to encourage fruit to ripen
As well as eating them fresh and in salads and giving some away – we made tomato soup, tomato sauce, tomato passata with own red onions, apple and tomato chutney, tomato tarts and best of all – cold sliced tomatos on warm toast with tahini. Probably look like a tomato
sunnypolarbear 