Monday 12 September 2011

Ripening


As instructed by Monty Don on Friday evening I have denuded all the tomato plants of their foliage, to encourage ripening. I also removed the tatty old sweet peas from around the outside and cleaned off all the shading paint. I'm hoping I won't be left with lots and lots of green tomatoes at the end of the season. I'm not that keen on green tomato chutney, to be honest.



These are the plants that were grown from sideshoot cuttings. I didn't think they were going to come to much, but in the end they have done really well. They don't look very pretty with all their leaves stripped off but you can see how much fruit they have produced. Being F1 hybrids, Sungold toms are not the best value for money, but with this technique you can make them go twice as far.


These are the first two peppers to start ripening, plenty more of these, although mostly quite small. No more aubergines to report, but lots of chillies ripening too.

I still haven't managed to get to the new plot, but I hope to make a start this week or next week, and will be carrying out the annual review shortly. It hasn't been the best year, with quite a few failures, but more on that next time....

1 comment:

Jo said...

Your tomatoes look to be doing really well, and it looks like you've done really well with the side shoots too. I might try that myself next year. I saw Monty advising to remove all the foliage, but I haven't done it. I thought I'd leave the plants with a few leaves for now. I haven't had any ripe peppers yet, they're turning red slowly but surely.