You say tomato, I say passata

Every year, without fail I pack my greenhouse to the rafters with tomato plants.  Tomatoes are one of my least favourite foods, in fact I don't really like them at all. But I love growing them, hubby likes eating them and I like making passata to store in the freezer for winter pasta dishes.

I had some Franchi seeds (San Marzano and St Pierre) left over from a previous year and also 'rediscovered' some seed swap varieties hidden in the bottom of my overflowing tin that I had yet to try out. So I sowed 4 varieties in February – my new varieties for 2013 being Cuor di Bue (Ox Heart) and Tigerella.

Space is really an issue in my little concrete-floored greenhouse, but with a bit of grow-bag jiggery-pokery, I can shoehorn 8 plants onto my restricted floor space, leaving the staging surface clear for chilli plants and smaller plant propagules in trays. 

The very late spring meant that it was early June before I moved them outside, my final planting tally being 2 each of Cuor di Bue and Tigerella and 1 each of San Marzano and St Pierre. The wonderfully warm weather in June and July brought the plants on well and they flowered strongly. But pollination seemed to be an issue for some of them (despite tapping the plants regularly to distribute pollen and leaving the greenhouse door open as often as possible). 

The Cuor di Bue crop has been the largest in terms of fruit size – huge double or triple fruits with a very 'meaty' texture and few seeds.

The Tigerella crop was wave upon wave of small juicy fruits, which is continuing still well into September. According to those who have tasted them, these are the sweetest tomatoes I've grown so far.

Of my 2 Franchi varieties, St Pierre has been a moderate harvest with some nice sized fruits but San Marzano was certainly the worst. A single plant produced fewer than 10 fruits, none of which exceeded 5 or 6cm in length. Quite disappointing really, compared with other years. 

But all the tomatoes have been regularly collected as they've ripened and roasted as a mixture to form the base of my pasta dishes for the months to come.  Now that's how I do like to eat my tomatoes!

Redcurrant jelly - a recipe

First watch in early spring as green leaves unfurl from what looks like a dead twig stuck in the ground. Water well if Mother Nature decides not to bother and add a suitable feed to boost production.

Step back in amazement as not only does the dead twig seem to be alive after all but by mid June it is fully clothed in leaves and adorned with racemes of tiny flowers. It cannot be denied that I've seen more colourful flowers, but they have a charm all of their berry own. (see what I did there?)

Harvest resulting berries when they have ripened to a translucent plumpness, wash thoroughly and add to a pan with water. Heat rapidly, squashing the berries with a potato masher.

Pour pan contents into a jelly bag to drain overnight. Measure volume of liquid obtained and add sugar (450g sugar per 600ml juice).

Start over a low heat, then increase heat skimming any surface scum as you go. Check for setting after reaching jam point (a quick internet search will give you this info if you're unsure). Add resulting tiny amount of jelly to a sterilised jar and once set, proudly display to anyone who passes by. Ignore husband's first comment of, 'Is that it?' 

A cuckoo in the nest

A moral, if one were needed, on the importance of plant labels. (And putting them on the right plant)

I sowed my curcurbit seeds in April and tended them carefully as any good veg gardener does. I kept them in the warm, I watered them sparingly and I talked to them kindly. I always sow more seeds than I think I'll need, just so I have replacement plants if any wither before their time. And this year I had a bumper selection of curcurbit seeds, from stripy courgettes to yellow ones, from butternut squash to acorn squash – the suburban veg plot had never seen the like of it before! Having so many different varieties also meant I'd needed to write up some new labels for the pots.

As the weeks passed, I potted up the growing plants and moved them first to the greenhouse, then to the cold frame as I prepared them for life outdoors. I had to write up more plant labels at this stage as I'd sown them 2 or 3 to a pot. Upon selecting the plants I wanted to keep, I potted up a stripy courgette for my mum (a now annual tradition) and also gave her a spare butternut squash plant to replace one that had died in her garden. My own plants were planted out into the raised beds and daily protected from the onslaught of slugs that May brought with it.

Come the middle of July, my mum mentioned that her courgette plant had started to produce fruits but her butternut squash was yet to get started. I checked on my plants and found that although there were a few male flowers opening, neither of mine had started any fruiting yet. But I couldn't shake the thought that the courgette plant looked a bit different, maybe a bit on the, I don't know, pumpkiny side...?

The next week I got a call from a very puzzled mum. Being a newbie veg grower she often rings for advice on seedlings or plant spacings, but this question was not one I was expecting. Her butternut squash plant had finally started to fruit – but it seemed to be producing a courgette!
I just couldn't come up with an explanation for that – that is until the next time I was surveying the veg plot and discovered this little fella hiding under a leaf on my 'courgette' plant.

It's a good thing my mum likes courgettes.... And maybe I'll give her one of these once they've ripened.

Other people's gardens

It's said that gardeners are a friendly bunch and indeed there's something about growing plants, be they for ornament or food, that brings out the sharing aspect. Whether it's a spare tomato seedling, a cutting from a favourite hydrangea or a jar of homemade strawberry jam, gardening tends to open people up to their fellow human in a way that few other activities do.
So imagine a weekend where you could head off to someone's garden, to have a look at their borders and beds, check how neat their lawn is or how tall their potato haulms are. To discuss with a friend how healthy those perennial grasses are or how disorganised that shed looks; how good the tea is or how the lemon drizzle cake is almost as good as your gran used to make. And to ask the garden owner themselves how do they bring on their dahlias so early in the season or what's their secret to keeping their roses blackspot free.

Well, garden blog readers of England and Wales, that weekend has arrived, and arrived with a flourish!
Let me introduce you to the inaugural National Gardens Festival Weekend from the NGS!

There are 800 gardens open over the weekend across England and Wales, so there's sure to be one not too far from you. From urban oases to rural idylls, allotments to artisan gardens, there is every type of garden opening covering the tiniest courtyard to the biggest landscaped parklands. And the money raised from admissions, plant sales, teas and cakes goes to national nursing and caring charities including Marie Curie Cancer Care, Macmillan, Help the Hospices, Carers Trust, The Queen's Nursing Institute and Perennial. The aim for this first-time open garden festival is to raise £500,000 over the 2 days – a tough challenge – but one that every garden lover can play their part in.

And talking of challenges, who better to take on the task of visiting gardens in 5 counties in 1 day during the Festival Weekend than Anneka Rice! 

So, if that has inspired you to join in this festival of foliage, flowers and fresh cream teas, then here's the current map of where they're taking place. Click here to access the map on the NGS website and keep your fingers crossed for the weather!

Raspberries on the cheap

In autumn last year I picked up a couple of 'end of the line' plants from a well-known home and garden superstore. Let me just say, I don't usually buy plants from there - strimmer cord yes, all purpose filler yes, but not plants. However, when raspberry canes are on sale for 10p each, it would seem to be a bargain worth snapping up. I mean, what's the worst that could happen? They'd all die and I'll be 30p out of pocket?

So, I took home my new plants and soaked the rootballs in water before potting them up and pruning back the old canes. Then I googled Raspberry 'Malling Jewel' and salivated at the idea of early season summer raspberries.

Fast forward to March/April, I patiently checked for signs of any new shoots but there were none to be seen. Eventually in mid May, they started to break through the surface, slowly yet steadily.

So, we're now heading towards the middle of June, I have my supports in place and the canes themselves are looking healthy but still only about 30cm tall with no signs of any flower buds yet. Somehow, I can't imagine that things are going to be moving so quickly that I'll still have raspberries by July...

What do we think? Is this a case of big company mislabelling/mixing up stock and what I've actually got is an autumn fruiting variety? Or has the cold, cold spring held back the growth? Or were they simply planted too late last year to start producing canes at the optimum time?

This novice raspberry grower would be grateful for all suggestions.

Cake in the sun

It was a fabulously sunny day on Sunday here in my little corner of Hertfordshire, which made it all the more sad that I had quite a lot of horticulture revision to get done. And not the kind of revision where you can wander around the garden deadheading plants while you try to recall their Latin name and preferred growing conditions. No, it was the kind you can only really do sitting indoors at a laptop, surrounded by books containing details of pathway foundation materials (hoggin and MOT type 1, for the hardcore nerds among you) and biosecurity approaches to the storage of topsoil during garden construction.

So, this meant I couldn't get out to any NGS open gardens in order to mark Chelsea Fringe: The Bloggers' Cut – a virtual gathering brought together over at Veg Plotting. However, I did manage to whiz up a quick cake of my own and enjoy it with a coffee sitting in my own garden. My cake choice was driven by leftovers. A jar of stem ginger really needed finishing off so I found a ginger cake recipe online which I tweaked in order to use the rhubarb cooking juices strained off while making rhubarb fool on Friday. I am nothing if not thrifty when it comes to cooking...

It was a lovely cake, though I suspect Mary Berry would pronounce it slightly underbaked. Personally, I consider perfectionism a failing.

So, to share with you a little more than the green shades of the garden predominant in the photo above, here are some gorgeous flowers in full colour in my garden this weekend.

A rather vibrant Dahlia 'Bishop of Landaff' that I picked up at Chelsea Flower Show

A Californian Lilac that seems to be invigeling its way into my favour despite me trying to cut it down for 3 years

Self-seeded aquilegias – quite the most welcome flowers in the garden

As above, in hot pink

And possibly the latest late tulip I've ever known

Yet another Chelsea roundup

I thoroughly enjoyed the show gardens on Main Avenue and at the risk of repeating anything you've already read about them on other blogs, here's my opinion of a few of them.

Firstly, the M&G Centenary garden 'Windows through Time' by Roger Platts. Probably winner of the 'show garden I could most live with'. Beautiful plantings with a great variety of textures. Described in the accompanying brochure as: 'a garden designed to capture what every visitor to Chelsea, whether in 1913 or 2013, would love to take home with them.'  Roger easily achieved this by including what seemed to be every single plant in existence in the garden. I've never seen such a plant list – it covers 5 pages of the brochure. Loads of fabulous specimens though, from huge foxglove spires, to spreading Cornus kousa in flower, and the world's favourite daisy: Erigeron karvinskianus. Not pictured below, but there was a drift of what looked like Achillea 'Moonshine' towards the front of the garden. A bit acid for me, if I'm honest. It was possibly a replacement as the printed plant list showed Achillea 'Summerwine', which I couldn't see at all. A special mention has to go to the M&G bag – so capacious, I got a second one to carry all my plant swag home on the Saturday.

On to the B&Q/Sentebale 'Forget-Me-Not' garden by Jinny Blom, otherwise known as 'Prince Harry's Garden'. A tranquil affair overall with some lovely lumpy planting of Leptinella squalida 'Platts Black', Selaginella helvetica, and pale blue Forget-me-nots in flower. The willow pollards lining one side added a lovely structural, yet airy feel, and gave me the sense of open landscape rather than enclosed garden. Cool grey curving steps led up to what looked like Stoke's missing pottery kiln and the less said about the clay ashtray in the middle, the better. It reminded me of the waltzers, back when the fair came to the village common every Easter and all the 5th year girls tried to get off with the bloke in charge of the bumper cars.

The Delancey East Village Garden by Michael Balston and Marie-Louise Agius was a wonderful representation of public planting inspired by the redevelopment of the Olympic Park into residential areas. While the plant choices themselves aren't my particular cup of garden tea (Zantedeschias and rhododendrons),  I loved the shapes and spaces they'd created and think that the stepped watercourse could be recreated in even the most modest suburban garden.

The Telegraph garden by Christopher Bradley-Hole: I so want to like this garden and indeed feel that I may be judged harshly by the gardening elite for not doing so. It is elegant, considered, in proportion, well-planned and expertly constructed – all the things a good garden should be. But it includes monastic cloisters (who doesn't have those?) and the whole premise of the garden is that it is to be viewed from that cloistered area. Yes, that's right, from the bit that the general public can't gain access to. And Christopher, you complained about the Best in Show being awarded to the Australians. Whatever balanced way you do that and however validated your points are by others in the gardening media, it's always going to sound like sour grapes. On the plus side you did include Tulipa sprengeri, even if you did make me search for them.

So finally, to the Arthritis Research Garden designed by Chris Beardshaw. Simply beautiful. A very personal and heartfelt design and a well deserved People's Choice Winner.