I’ve aready confessed to having lost the plot in the garden this year.  But it does carry on regardless, doesn’t it?  Last year I battled through with tomatoes, staking, watering, feeding, pinching out, and had to contend with splitting, blossom-end rot and terminal green-ness so I vowed I’d only grow them in my mother’s greenhouse in future, or not at all.

Of course this didn’t happen, due to my mother’s new knee saga so, succumbing to a rush of blood to the head, I bought two hanging baskets of Tumbler tomatoes thinking they would be ornamental as well as useful.  Once hung in a prominent position by the back gate, all the leaves shrivelled up and died.  I’m not going to insult my post with a photo.  They were so hideous I removed them from sight, parked them by the shed and ignored them. There, watered by the rain running off the shed roof and without a drop of Tomorite, they produced a good crop of tasty unblemished tomatoes.

I did manage to sow a few salad leaves in the raised beds, where,  in amongst the rocket which had been sadly decimated by something unidentified and voracious, I found the offspring of all those disasterous tomatoes of last year.  These are now tall and healthy and just beginning to fruit.

I am now watering them and pinching out etc, but will my intervention now mean they are going to turn up their toes? Where’s Alan Titchmarsh when you need him?  If they start sulking now I may well be on here in a few weeks time showing the world my little pots of green tomato chutney.

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