You say 'tomato', I say let's plant out 200 of them!

15th May: Inclement weather drove us into the shelter of the polytunnels this week. Plummeting temperatures (back to around 10-12 degrees C) and sporadic driving rain confused everything as winter seemed to rear its ugly head once more – hopefully its a last stand, and summer will win out.

Although the rain put paid to another tractor lesson – rotavating rows for roots and beans – it wasn’t all bad. We swiftly transferred our energies into planting out tomatoes indoors. About four of our numerous varieties found liberation in the polytunnel:

Cedrico – your classic round English tomato, perfect for exhibition purposes, apparently!
Red Debarao – an heirloom variety that produces deep-red plum tomatoes
Inca – another plum
Rosada – a sweet, cherry plum tomato

Planting tomatoes requires a whole lotta love: they are hungry so need a lot of compost, and they are big heavy cordon plants so need to be buried deep in the soil with string for support. As well as love, you’ve also got to give them a bit of abuse: removing lower leaf shoots in order to bury the plant deep down; and also ‘pinching out’ sideshoots. Now this is the scary part as sometimes the sideshoots are really big and it’s a nerve wracking experience snapping them off. However, it’s got to be done. Cordon tomatoes will concentrate all their energy into growing up, and then growing outwards. Sideshoots appear in the ‘elbows’ between the main stem and leaf shoots (see pic below). They will produce lots of leafy growth and eventually fruit. This is fine but probably not a great use of our resource if we want the tomato to produce a healthy crop quickly (English summers are notoriously short after all!). Better to concentrate the energy in the leaf shoots which will produce flowering trusses where the fruit will form. Off they come then.

Preparing beds in the polytunnel offers valuable time to get up close and personal with our soil life. Unfortunately we have precious few worms as yet, and I’m pretty sure that a canny blackbird that has discovered the polytunnel buffet is probably munching what is left. Bringing in plenty of compost should be helping slowly but surely. The predictable colony of slugs are hunkered down amongst the tightly packed lettuces. Why doesn’t the blackbird help himself to them?

It’s not all bad though. Bart spotted ladybird larvae and these little guys munch aphid like no tomorrow.

A particularly freaky thing I’ve been finding a few of recently is the pupa of the noctuid or owlet moth. The larvae of this moth are pests known as cutworms that eat the bases of young brassicas and lettuces – great! The hard, shiny pupae that the caterpillar forms is like something from Alien. They’re rusty red in colour with a hard shell at one end and a pointy tail at the other end. If you inadvertently (or indeed intentionally) put pressure on the hard end, lo and behold – the tail begins to rotate! Petrifying! The cutworm could be very damaging. Hand removal seems to be the best organic control method available.

We ordered new drip pipes this week to lay out under Mypex for our brassicas and other plants. The porous pipe is way more efficient than watering from above – either with a hose or an oscillating irrigator. I’ve heard that the pipes are up to 70% more efficient and there are quite a few other benefits too. As our soil is free draining watering outdoors could become critical when the sun comes back.