Sunday 17 July 2016

Lots of green tomatoes, not very much ready to eat

My tomato plants have grown huge. I'm a little worried they've grown too big, they've spilt out of their allocated area and are crowding out the onions and the radishes. This is fine if they're going to use the space to grow me tomatoes, but my fear is that they've instead put all their effort into leaves and aren't too interested in fruiting. So far, all my tomatoes are still green and tiny. I was away on holiday when Monty Don said I should be removing surplus shoots and by the time I got back they were massive and everywhere.

In fact, I'm generally not getting much food from the garden at the moment. I was getting quite a few peas, albeit never truly enough for two portions at the same time, but now most of my peas are affected by little worms that the Internet tells me are moth maggots and just one of those things peas suffer from.
You can tell which pods have them, they tend to be wrinkly on the outside and to have fuzzy white stuff on the inside, even if the little maggots are not yet crawling out of the peas.

The first picture is barely affected peas, the second badly affected ones. I'm not convinced I have any unaffected peas left, and given that some of the plants are covered in white powdery mildew, it's probably time for all of them to come out and not go in the compost heap.
Still, my raspberries are doing well, despite their inauspicious location, where practically nothing else will grow.

And the stevia, those rather scrappy plants in front of the raspberry are also still alive, even if not much else is down there. I'm not sure what went wrong with my carrots and beetroots, but basically I don't have any despite sowing seeds twice!
My sweetcorn also looks like it's going to be ready soon.
 I'm also hopeful I might have enough runner beans and French beans to eat tonight.
I think the garden is currently probably looking about the best it's going to look this year, I rather suspect it's going to start looking tattier soon. I'm not sure if that's vegetable gardening in general or whether it's just me not putting enough effort in. The problems with my back mean there are some jobs like weeding I tend to avoid doing at the ideal level, although, unusually, I did manage to mow the lawn today and I'm hoping it's not going to have too much impact on my ability to sleep tonight. Edited: the night of sleep could have been a lot worse, so I guess all those workouts I've been doing at the gym are finally paying off and mowing is back on the agenda for me.

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