Tales of a novice gardener in Norwood, London

Wednesday, May 10, 2006

Tomato plant overload

In my infinite wisdom of sewing lots of tomato seeds, expecting most to fail, I now have about 20 tomato plants and not enough room in my little plastic greenhouse. I'm hoping to harden them off fairly soon and get them outside to make way for more sewings. Luckily I love tomatoes and they are so versatile that I have no doubt we'll get through them. Anything left can just get made into a tomato sauce and then frozen anyway. This is assuming that they all fruit successfully of course.

I have two courgette plants really coming on, which I've repotted and hoping to get outside soon too. My greenhouse is absolutely stuffed full and one or two things are suffering now from lack of good light.

On the potato front, I'm busily earthing up the Duke of Yorks and Charlottes but keep running out of compost. I must have spent hundreds on the bloody stuff this year but hopefully it will be worth it. I've now rolled the compost bags right up so just need to earth up to the top and then leave them to it. Need to do that this weekend in order to ensure I get lots more tatties. The rest of the potatoes in the raised bed are really starting to come up too. Once they are all up, I'll take the netting off and earth them up.

I've now planted the rest of my beds. On May Bank Hol weekend, I created wigwams using bamboo cane and have sewn French beans and sugar snaps. One or two of these are starting to germinate already and I think they will look great once they start climbing the canes. I may plant my sweet peas amongst them as they are finally germinating in the greenhouse.

In the other empty bed, I've sewn squash and pumpkin, although I'm a bit worried they will take over as apparently they get huge. Thing is, I absolutely adore squash so have to grow it. Someone on the Grapevine forum said that you can grow trailing squash in growbags and bush squash in 12 inch containers so I'm going to try that one - more compost! Got some red cabbage into this bed too.

Sewed some parsnips in a black bucket I got for £1.99 from the garden centre. Cheap is the key when planting as many tubs as I am!

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