Fruit, Veg, Flowers and Slugs

I am currently enjoying a bit of a glut on the Tomato front, no bad thing, and find myself experimenting with a number of recipes; that said an oven baked Beefsteak Tomato is still one of my favourite guilty pleasures. The   Buffalo Steak Tomatoes  from the Greenhouse have been a roaring success, baked, fried, in a salad, on a burger or in a sandwich I have used them in multiple ways for breakfast, lunch and dinner recently and these will definitely be grown again in the future - absolutely brilliant. The  Gigantomo  variety are also cropping strongly with a number of large fruits on the plants I have allowed them to grow on. I have a couple of very large fruits on one plant I deliberately left only a few tomatoes on but no world record breaker.  The Tomato varieties I am growing outside on the veg patch following the disaster that was the Limoncito and Black Cherry seedlings failing on me are now of course the  Yellow Pear  and  Pink  Brandywine   and these are going well I am happy t

It says on the catch line of this blog that it is  chronicling my successes and failures as an amateur gardener on my plot in Essex on the veg patch and in the flower bed, well the first major failure has happened and the Limoncito and Black Cherry seedlings have all wilted and died. I think, despite being inside under cover, the lack of light and warmth over the last few days has done for them. With hindsight, a wonderful thing, I probably should have kept them on the windowsill of my back bedroom until stronger rather than moving them to the unheated Conservatory; I may also have made the classic error of overwatering.  It is annoying but most years something goes wrong, you can't get it right all the time and that is all part and parcel of gardening.  On the plus side, the Gigantomo and Beef Steak Tomato plants are growing by the day in the Greenhouse and strong and healthy - sometimes it is just bad timing, these seeds were of course sown earlier than the  Limoncito  and  Bl