Surprise crop

It's one thing going to the plot to harvest a long-awaited crop but quite another when you come home with a pocket full of something you didn't even plant. Today I found a truss of ripe tomatoes, nestling in amongst the skeletal remains of my Aster daisies. I hadn't seen the plant or fruits develop but they must have been there for some time.

Tomatoes: Don't believe the hype

I have heard from various sources that you can successfully ripen green tomatoes by putting them in a drawer, box etc. with a banana. The gas released by the banana as it ripens will turn the tomatoes red. I am happy to confirm that this is complete rubbish. All you get are mouldy tomatoes, a wasted banana, and if you're really lucky some nasty liquid will dribble out of whatever container you're using. The best thing I have found for green tomatoes so far is to chuck 'em straight back on the compost heap.

Late summer on Plot 29

The Moog and I have been a bit busy to update the blog recently, or possibly a bit lazy, take your pick. I'm going to have a go at bringing things up-to-date over the next few days. Let's start with the end of August.

It occured to me in August that it's a full year since I've had my plot. You may have read that I invested my £7 winnings from second place in the 2007 "Britain in Bloom" competition; this year, ta-da, I have won first prize! a whopping twenty Great British Pounds, and a certificate to boot. I will post some pictures of my front garden for curious blog readers when I get round to it. This year, I invested my winnings in a delicious curry from Cafe Balti in Wolverton.


Also in late summer (Hmph! What summer?! I hear you cry) harvesting was in full flow. I was a bit worried about carrots splitting, so I pulled most of them up in late August and put them in storage. There were loads, as you can see from the picture. Some of them were forked, some of them were split, but overall they've been pretty good. No carrot fly attacks. To store them, I bought a grow-bag for about £1.25 from the nearest DIY shed, and filled two cardboard boxes with layers of carrots and compost. So far (November) they're as fresh and crunchy as they were when they went in. Mind you, the bottom did fall out of one of the boxes last week, covering my shed floor in carrots and compost, you can imagine how pleased I was.


Onions were also dug up, dried in the garden at home (between rain showers), and strung up in the shed. We've been gradually working our way through them, and they're storing really well.

From the greenhouse at home, we collected a big bowl of green tomatoes and ripened them on the window sill. I have to say I couldn't tell the difference between ours and shop-bought ones (that is, ours were not the delicious globes of sweet flavour that I'd been led to expect). And if one more person mentions green tomato chutney, I may have to set an angry Moog on them.

The final crop I started harvesting in late summer was potatoes. The Sarpo Mira variety have been really successful, lots of nice big potatoes, no blight, and they seem to store really well. They eventually all came out of the ground in mid-September, although I think they might have been happy to stay in the ground a bit longer, they were starting to receive attention from slugs, so they came up.

Failure Count

I have had lots of congratulations from various people on my successes this year, so Moog thought I should let reality have a look in and share some of my failures:

1. Cut and Come Again salad leaves. These all bolted to seed. In fairness, not really a failure, because the reason they bolted was that I chose not to pick them - they didn't taste very nice!

2. Wild Rocket. All germinated, and then all completely wiped out by flea beetle. Almost overnight there was nothing left, not even a stalk.

3. Radishes and Pak Choi have been riddled with holes by flea beetle. This is probably due to me eradicating their favoured food source, which is Oilseed Rape. I can't win.

4. Tomatoes. I don't know why I bother. One minute they're fine, the next minute, the stems and fruits are brown with blight. John pointed it out to me this week and I was forced to burn all my allotment tomatoes. Greenhouse crop is still going steady at home. For now.

5. Leek rust. This covered my garlic, but luckily didn't spoil the crop. It has now graduated on to my leeks. Hopefully the white parts under the soil will be saved from destruction (apparently you can still eat rusty leeks if it doesn't get too bad) but after seeing how fast it spread I have decided to resort to a chemical spray of dithane (fungicide) on this crop to try and save them.

6. Split carrots. I avoided carrot fly, but quite a few carrots got too big and split, so I've had to harvest them all to stop them growing any bigger. Hopefully I'll be able to store them for long enough, only time will tell.

I blame all these problems squarly on the weather - a bit more sunshine and warmth in August wouldn't go amiss! The only time we did get any sun, I went to the plot in shorts and got attacked by my next pest:

7. Red ants. These aggressive little blighters managed to get into my boot and bit me 4-5 times, making my whole foot swell up to about twice normal size! And it itched like mad!

So there you go; it's not all rosy down at the plot, even if I make it look that way sometimes.