March Gardening Magazines

This month, tomatoes storm the cover of both Grow it ! and Kitchen Garden.

Grow Your Own:

General articles on sowing, successional sowing and a glossary of sowing terms.

Although as tomatoes, even if planted at different times, seem to catch up with each other and are more dependent on the number of days, different varieties take to ripen I’m not sure how applicable successional sowing  would be.

Recommendations for heirloom tomatoes to try:

• Brandywine
• Black Prince
• Costoluto Genovese

And a great idea to plant up a cook’s hanging basket of tumbling tomatoes, chillies and basil.

If you’re interested in more unusual propagators there’s a review of 6 different models including a super capacity one for £385.

Grow it !

An article on compost making with the focus on utilizing it as part of a homemade potting compost mix.
The mix for potting up young tomato plants would be:

• 1 part loamy soil
• 2 parts sieved homemade compost
• 1 part vermiculite

An article on Italian vegetables recommending San Marzano for sauces and passata and Costoluto Fiorentino as a beef steak.

I’m less sure about the recommendation for Garden Pearl as compact/making an attractive and edible centrepiece. The fruit itself is a cherry but if my plants last year were anything to go by, it would need to be a sizeable table.

Its ‘in pot’ habit was relaxed, bordering on sprawl. As were those at  Hampton Court.

Kitchen Garden

A glut of good articles.

101 ways to a slug free garden – surely some of them must work ?

Articles on seed sowing in general along with reminders to sow tomato seeds now if they are to be planted undercover and that those sown last month will now be ready to be pricked out.

A Back to Basics article on tomatoes, covering everything from sowing to seedlings to planting and aftercare.

Recommended varieties:

• Britain’s Breakfast
• Sun Baby
• Sunbelle
• Shirley F1
• Gardeners Delight
• Venus
• Tumbler (with hanging baskets in mind)

And if eating home grown tomatoes doesn’t feel like prize enough, then for the show bench and hopefully a red card to take home:

• Classy
• Cederico

An article by a botanist looking into the tag of superfood that gets attached to the tomato – why is that and can it be justified ?

More variety recommendations from a grower who starts tomatoes off in shared 7.5cm pots on the window sill before pricking them out in to individual 7.5 cm pots.

• The Amateur
• Chadwick
• Golden Cherry
• Red Brandywine
• Pink Brandywine

And then a really interesting article by tomato guru, Terry Marshall on grafting. In this years’ bigger seed catalogues, grafted tomato plants have made a high profile appearance.

 This article explains the benefits of this technique along with a step-by-step guide on how to grow you own rootstock from He-Man F1 seeds and how to then make a graft, from that and your chosen variety.

So a month heavy with tomato promise and lovely to see photos of the small, soft, green plants which hold so much of summer’s promise.