Fruit, Veg, Flowers and Slugs

  As I write this article in early September, I am sitting in the garden in thirty-degree heat ; what a crazy summer of weather we have had this year. Most of my time of late has been taken up with the harvest o n the vegetable patch. At least twice a week I am blanching and freezing Runner Beans and the bottom tr a y of my freezer is already full. They are a great vegetable to have on your patch and I would encourage everyone to grow them as they will supply you with bean s throughout the summer and into autumn with plenty over to freeze ready for roast dinner s through the winter months. The Tomatoes have been cropping like crazy and when not dealing with the beans I have been bus y making Tomato Ketchup and BBQ Sauce. The Buffalo Steak tomato plants r emain ladened and t he re’ll be a few more hours spent making sauce before the season is over .    My recipe for Tomato Ketchup is pretty standard though I have tweaked it a little down the years; if you are interested it ca

And so it begins that wonderful time of the year as the tomatoes begin to ripen. I mentioned recently that the first of the Tiny Tim tomatoes (they are tiny) had begun to ripen, well many of the other varieties I am growing this year are now ripening as well. I spoke at the start of the year about how I planned to grow more tomatoes than ever before and so far so good as they say. As yet none of the four Buffalosteak plants   growing on the outside patch are ripe but I have plenty of fruit on the plants and having grown these before I was always confident they would go well. Also in the outdoor patch are the heirloom variety from Germany Tomato Bloody Butcher . A variety that has Potato like foliage (as Pink Brandywine) my research into this one suggested it would produce crops of golf ball sized fruit with a dark 'blood-red' juice. It reportedly is one of the first varieties to ripen, ripening in only about 60-days, and continues all summer long and I hoped it would be perf

I mentioned in my June article that summer felt as though it was just around the corner and the sun has been shining pretty constantly since. I am not going to complain about that after the winter and spring that we had, but it does bring with it a new set of challenges to be dealt with. We have had a couple of thunderstorms but in general it has been dry and pretty warm. The Barbara Butternut Squash plants are loving the weather and spreading across the vegetable patch at quite a rate, and in fact have outgrown the space allotted them. Luckily the growth spurt on the Squashes coincided with the Pea's coming to and end so I have taken out the Pea plants to give the Squashes some extra room to roam. This year I was once again growing  Pea Bingo  which is  a  dwarf  e arly  m aincrop  variety  growing no higher than about two-and-a-half feet. They cropped well again, though in truth I probably didn't sow enough, and next year I will almost certainly dedicate more room on the p

The latest article for the Romford Recorder was released last week and you can read it below. I deal with most of what has been happening on the plot in the article other than mentioning the ongoing battle with weeds! I wondered if the very cold snap we had in winter would have killed many weed seeds but going by my plot that has not been the case; honestly I think I have more weeds than ever. I can only assume this is down to the very dull and wet spring we have had followed by the relatively nice conditions of late encouraging growth.  One job I have undertaken recently not mentioned in the newspaper editorial is to take up the old garden path that I had, put down by my Father many moons ago, and create a new Barbecue Patio halfway down the garden. I have re-used the most of the slabs taken up from the path to create the Barbecue  Patio so the only cost was for sand and cement and a fair amount of hard graft! The turf lifted to allow the patio to be laid was used to fill in the rathe