Last year at Hampton Court Flower Show the beautiful vegetable plot with the white wooden greenhouse captured my gardening heart. There’s wasn’t anything quite so spadestoppingly gorgeous this year. But I thought given my post earlier this week about tomato shower products this display was very apt !
A cast iron bath planted with Gardeners Delight, underplanted with Garden Pearl. When it really was time to replace it, my old iron bath got taken out in pieces – if I’d had a bit of imagination I could put it to good use. It was certainly deep enough for good root growth !
I’ve not grown tiny currant type tomatoes. Here’s Hundreds and Thousands. They’re certainly plentiful. I was dying to try just one, to see if a fruit that small can give a flavour kick… or maybe you need to down them in handfuls. Anyway I didn’t think pinching them off the display was quite the done thing…..so I still don’t know the answer to that one…
At the opposite end of the scale to the grafted cordons were these compact plants. Sweet and Neat. I think we’ll see a lot more of these diminutive sized varieties being bred. These were low to the ground, no sprawling allowed.
In the words of Captain Mainwaring ‘ Ah, just waiting to see who’d be the first one to spot that’….The that in this case being that it’s not a tomato. But I came across this twice at HC, in the Girl Guide garden and in Shakespeare’s veg patch. Strawberry Spinach ! A cunning plan of the ‘eat up your greens‘ variety ? Again, showing great restraint, we had to be satisfied with description ’ sweet fruit, bitter leaf ‘.
Finally, and with no points for spotting it’s not a tomato – a potato scarer . Keeping the birds off the bard’s brassicas, there was something satisfyingly simple and effective about this centuries old device.
