Saturday 20 September 2014

Storms and tomatoes

Around 6pm last night, the sky went light yellow, then dark yellow, orange and finally black, all in the space of 30 minutes. It was similar to a solar eclipse but quicker. It was most eerie. The thunder started shortly afterwards, followed by sheet lightening, then fork, then the rain.

Luckily for us, the rain was reasonable light. Our local on-line forecast however, just had us down for heavy cloud! We gather some places were not so lucky.

However, here in the East of the country, in the driest county, we had seen no rain for nearly 3 weeks and were jolly glad to have some. Watering the garden with cans takes a lot of hard work.

I went out to check my tomatoes this morning, using Disprin seems to have worked (unless we were just lucky), no sign of blight. The night time temperatures are getting too cool for outdoor tomatoes so we took the decision to harvest them all, coloured, green, large and small.

They are now sat in the conservatory on trays to dry out, we reckon around 6lb:

After that, we shall pack the green ones away as per Beechgrove instructions just over a week ago and see how they fare.




12 comments:

  1. What a lot, I am sure you will make something nice from them, tomatoes are one of my favourite foods.

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    1. At the moment, we are enjoying fresh tomatoes on toast, as an accompaniment with other things, but think we might just have to make some more sweet chilli sauce!

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  2. Wish I'd known of the Dispirin when we had our allotment, every single year we used to lose our toms to blight.
    Briony
    x

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  3. You know, being here in the US, when I saw your post headline I thought it said Storms and Tornadoes, cause, you know, that's what we get here, LOL!

    Love that top picture....it would make great computer screen wallpaper, ha. Nice harvest. Enjoy!!

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    1. Easily done, glad it's not just me that misreads things! The picture is of my hydrangea, dying and drying. The flowers get green brown eventually, then brown. I leave them on all winter to protect next years buds.

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  4. Lots of lovely tomatoes, I had enough to see us through but no surplus this year which is a shame. I must have missed your post on dispirin, will go back and have a look x

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    1. Didn't have any green tomatoes last year, shows what a different summer it has been!

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  5. I've been frantically loading up the dehydrator with mine! I love tomatoes :) We just had rain and gloom here yesterday - no thunder though

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    1. I did try to dehydrate some cherry ones, cut in half, but gave up after 12 hours and froze them!

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  6. We don't have any green tomatoes at all this year, the plants we had were very poor and they only produced enough for our salads. The greenhouse has been cleared out and ready for the winter, we store pots and a couple of bean trellises in there. Will you be growing anything over the winter?

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    1. We stored some tomatoes as per Beechgrove instructions, took the first box on our holidays, where they ripened slowly, so that works. We only grow leeks over the winter.

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