Carrying on in the face of adversity

Latest post from MARKSVEGPLOT – a blog about food and gardening in England”

Some people think that gardening is easy. How wrong can you be? It’s not just a case of sowing some seeds and sitting back and waiting for harvest-time, is it?

If you have been reading my blog over the past few days, you will know that yet again my tomatoes are having to cope with the insidious effects of weedkiller contamination. Yet despite this, the plants are setting fruit. Their urge to reproduce is very strong! I suspect that some of their fruit will not be true to type though. These weedkillers often alter the fruits of a plant as well as the leaves and stems. This next photo is of “Maskotka” tomatoes beginning to develop:

Normally, “Maskotka” fruits are round, but to me these ones look distinctly plum-shaped. What do you think?

Still, as long as they taste nice, and there are lots of them, I don’t really mind what shape they are!

The chilli plants are suffering too. Not only do they hate the cool, gloomy weather, they have also taken several batterings from exceptionally heavy rain, and hail. This “Cheiro Roxa” plant has many leaves perforated by the hail.

Some of the plants are also affected by the weedkiller problem, though fortunately not many, and not very severely this year.

Despite all this, there are chilli fruits appearing now. This one is an “Aji Limon”, on one of the over-Wintered plants that lost most of its leaves when I used the wrong washing-up liquid spray but then recovered.

This is another Good News item – all four of the side-shoot cuttings I took from a “Larisa” beefsteak tomato plant have all rooted well, and are developing into nice strong plants.

Just a couple of days ago I re-potted them into bigger pots, and with more space and fresh compost I expect they will grow quite rapidly, but I’m still not convinced they will be able to get big enough to bear fruit before our Summer (such as it is) is finished. Only time will tell.

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