With so much in April’s Gardening Magazines, I’m going to cover each in turn. Starting with Kitchen Garden; Beetroot on the cover but plenty of tomato titbits in-between.
Handy Tips for Making Life Easier:
- Soft Tie, flexible tie for tying in stems to supports, a quick alternative to cutting length of string and figure of 8 knots.
- Reusable Grow Bags; 23 cm deep, holding 90 litres of compost, an upgrade on the amount held by the ready-mades and your own choice of compost.
Recommended Tomato Varieties:
- Readers Top Choices: Sungold, Gardeners Delight and Tropical Ruby
- Grown by regular contributors, Stream Cottage: Amish Paste, Pink Oxheart, San Marzano.
Greenhouse Tomatoes in April:
If you and your tomatoes dwell in the milder parts of the UK, and have an unheated greenhouse, come April, as long as the temperatures undercover, don’t drop below 10 -15C, (they can cope if they go below but only for a short period) tomatoes can go into their final growing position.
They’re ready for the big move when they reach 20cm high, are sturdy looking and the 1st flower truss is beginning to open. (I didn’t do this last year. I was planting outdoors but they’d been in their final positions quite a while before 1st flowers appeared. I’m going to need to research – did I unknowingly broke a golden rule ?!)
If planting in rows, plant Cordons 45-60cm apart, allowing more room between them if it’s a very vigorous variety being planted. An additional 30 cm, which added to the stated range, would space them somewhere between 75cm and 90cm apart.
Growing in the greenhouse offers 3 options for where to plant:
- The border, directly into border soil
- Grow Bags
- Pots
Different things can be said of each:
- The volume and depth of soil in the border will mean less feeding and less watering are required than with bags or pots. But putting tomatoes in the same border space each year results in soil borne diseases.
- Grow Bags on the other hand mean fresh, clean growing medium every year. The problem of shallow compost can be addressed by the use of compost filled, bottomless pots which sit on top of the bag compost . However what can’t be changed is bag length. And even limiting planting to two per bag won’t allow for the ideal spacing in-between plants.
- Pots: Big is best, a volume of 15 litres and diameter of 25-30 cms. A tip which I’d not come across before was to fill the pot only 2/3rds with potting compost which allows room for top dressing with fresh compost when extra nutrients are needed. I’m not sure how this sits with the fact you start feeding the plants with a potash feed anyway….. I feel more research coming on to see if this method is standard, recommended practice.
More from the April issues tomorrow …
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
You say : They’re ready for the big move when they reach 20cm high… and the 1st flower truss is beginning to open. (did I unknowingly broke a golden rule ?!)
I planted my tomatoes out long before I saw a flowering truss… in fact it was my first year and I didn’t even know what a flowering truss was. It all seemed to go okay for me. I’ll be interested to see if you have further research to share. I harvested masses of cream sausage, and thoroughly enjoyed the main crop. I had quite a lot of green at the end, if that helps. When I say ‘quite a lot’, it was nothing compared to the actual ripened crop.
A truss – and a flowering one at that- was a mystery to me too. I don’t how long it was before I sussed out that a truss had no leaves, just flowers followed by fruit and that the leaves did their own thing on seperate branches. It made me realise how easy it is to ‘look’ at things,not see them how they are but how you think you are. If you’d asked me to draw a tomato plant a year ago I’m not sure I’d have put fruit on branches seperate from leaves. So the fact I would now and know what they’re called, is progress! I’ll see if I can find out of the reasoning behind the timing of the flowering 1st truss recommendation …..
Are you going to grow Cream Sausage again this year ?
I have an answer – it’s not fully rounded yet but is a principle. It’s about getting the plant to flower and fruit as soon as possible. If the plant is transferred to fresh compost before it flowers, it will think life is long and easy. Plenty of fresh compost and more space will mean its focus is on upwards and presumably leaf growth- where as give it a bit of stress ( in the form of no new compost and no extra room ) and it will think the end is nigh and it has to reproduce to save itself and its species… hence it flowers, so it can fruit , so it can disperse seed and all will be saved…. I want to understand better the link between space, nutrients and stress but in the meantime the principle rests in tricking the plant into thinking it doesn’t have much time left to reproduce… and hence waiting till the flowers appear as that’s the sign the reproduction process is underway .. which for us means tomatoes !