Another HUGE Tomato Harvest From My Small 15m² Kitchen Garden 🍅
Hello and welcome back. It is early September here in West Sussex and the rain has only just stopped, so I have grabbed my baskets and come out to pick the tomatoes before they split any further. There is a lot to get through in the little greenhouse and up on the trellis, three pumpkins to cut down, a cucumber the size of a marrow to deal with, and a few honest thoughts about how this strange season has treated my 15m2 kitchen garden.
A parcel of gloves, and why I always wear them
Before I start picking, a small thank you. CoolJobSafety got in touch through Instagram a few weeks ago and asked if I would like to try their gardening gloves. I expected one pair, maybe two. They sent four: two pairs of the standard soft gloves with the rubbery grip that I wear right through the warmer months and get through very quickly, a pair of thornproof gloves, and a waterproof winter pair with a fleecy lining that will come into its own when I am back to heavy digging in the cold. All in size small, which was a nice touch.
Some people say a real gardener does not use gloves, that you have to get your bare hands into the soil. That would not work for me, and not because I am squeamish. I have very thin, sensitive skin that cuts easily, and I do not want my hands covered in scratches all the time. The bigger reason is my daughter. She has a disability and is fed through a gastrostomy, a little button in her tummy that we use several times a day. I am a semi nurse in this house, so I simply cannot go around with dirty fingernails and cuts on my fingers. Clean hands matter, and gloves are how I garden and keep them that way.
The state of the garden in early September
It has been raining nearly every day lately and the tomatoes are showing it. A lot of the ripe ones in the greenhouse are hanging under their own weight and plenty on the trellis have split from the sheer volume of water. Most of the big ones will end up as passata.
The Femspot cucumber sitting on top of the trellis has quietly turned into something the size of a marrow. Under the bean arch things are worse. The beans have gone brown and crispy, and I cannot find a single healthy pod on them. That surprised me, because last autumn, in one of my very first videos, the same beans were still cropping well into late September or even October. The pumpkin stem that was alive in my last video is now dead too. My best theory is the summer we had. Our climate here is normally mild, around 20 degrees, and this year we sat near or above 30 for almost three months. Everything seems to have burnt itself out early.
On the brighter side, I have a tray of purple sprouting broccoli, winter cabbage and lettuce seedlings from the garden centre waiting to go into the empty potato bed. I still cannot get lettuce to germinate and survive to transplanting size at home, so finding ready grown plants made me happy. There are pansies too, to replace the petunias in the hanging baskets by the garage, which have gone well past pretty.
The dahlias that survived
The dahlias in the border have come back to life after the heat. Burlesca is flowering, though one stem is still flopping sideways even after I took the middle top off it. Wizard of Oz looks lovely, and my two favourites of the whole season are Totally Tangerine and Rhubarb and Custard, which has only one flower open right now but plenty of buds waiting behind it. It needs deadheading, like everything else.
I did have far more dahlias than this. The ones in pots on the decking never even got as far as flowering. They dried up and started dying, so I cut all the stems back and tucked the pots away in the shed to save the tubers for next year. It really has been a hard season for most plants.
A chilli question and a pepper plan
This is the first year I have ever managed to get chillies to actual fruit, and I need your help with them. The variety is Atomic, bought as a plant from the garden centre after my own seedlings went over the edge of the decking in the great mini greenhouse collapse earlier this year. The label says the fruit can be two colours, and right now I have some that are almost black, one that is red and one still green. I do not know how to read this plant. Are the dark ones ripe, or do I wait for red? Please tell me in the comments.
I also have bell peppers that are just starting to shape up, sitting in small pots on the bed. Once the finished tomatoes are cut out of the greenhouse I am thinking of lifting those pots and standing them on top of the big tomato pots in there, to give them a bit more warmth and stretch the season. My worry is that they have almost certainly rooted through into the bed by now, and I do not want to break that. If you have done this before, let me know whether it is a sensible idea.
Which tomato varieties earned their place
Rubylicious is my all time favourite cherry tomato and this year has confirmed it. It is enormously productive and the fruit is a proper normal cherry size. Sweet Aperitif, which I grew for the first time, has big trusses but the tomatoes are tiny and, if I am honest, a bit bland. I will not be wasting space on it again. Sungold is the other one that earned its keep. Those three plants have grown into the beans on one side and into the verbena on the other, and everything above the trellis is still covered.
Then there is Favorit, the beefsteak. It is a Polish variety, although I first bought it here in the UK four years ago without knowing what I was choosing, and it turned out to be the best beefsteak I have grown. I only had two plants this year because I gave the rest of the seedlings to someone who needed them. Next year I will grow more of those and fewer cherries. We eat plenty raw and I share bags with the neighbours and family, but there are still too many, and cherries are a fiddly thing to turn into passata with all that skin and so little flesh.
The big varieties in the greenhouse have not done what I hoped either. I expected bigger fruit and more of it. Maybe that is the season, maybe it is my high expectations. And the greenhouse itself has one real drawback: once it is full, it is very hard to reach in and do any maintenance. If I ever get a bigger garden, a proper full size greenhouse is priority number one. I think that is every gardener's dream.
Why I am saving my own seeds this year
I have been catching up on a backlog of other people's videos, and my favourite at the moment is Ali from My Rusty Garden. She has been doing a lot on tomato harvesting, varieties and seed saving, and she has, willingly or not, talked me into it. I have already started. I am not going to film that part, because it is my first time and I do not really know what I am doing yet, but it is happening.
The push came at the start of this season when I ran out of my favourite tomato seeds and had to buy fresh packets. The Rubylicious and Sungold packets each had ten seeds in them. Ten seeds for four pounds fifty. That is a ridiculous price. So that is it, I have said it out loud now: no more buying seeds. I am saving my own and we will see how it goes.
Cutting down the last pumpkins
The pumpkin stem is completely rotten now, and I suspect the cold nights are part of it. It is about 20 degrees in the day, but the evenings already feel like autumn. I had planned to leave the fruit hanging until the plant let go, but with the stem this far gone I was worried they would drop without me noticing and a sneaky rodent would get its teeth in first.
I dithered about it for a while, tried to work out how to cut one without taking the main stem, found that the first pumpkin in line was hanging off a thin, barely tied piece of stem that looks broken, and in the end cut all three. One is only half ripe but it will finish in the shed. That makes five pumpkins from one Small Sugar plant this year. I have already cooked one and saved the seeds from it, because this batch was the very last of a packet I bought four years ago when I started gardening. It is a lovely single meal size and I would recommend it to anyone.
Gymnastics on the trellis and the final haul
Picking the cherries from the top of the trellis is a workout. The structure holds the weight brilliantly, but reaching the trusses at the back would be so much easier if I could get to them from the verbena side. I trimmed some leaves as I went and cut out the finished plants in the greenhouse, keeping the ones still carrying fruit to ripen at home.
The final count for the afternoon: a full basket of the big tomatoes, some ripe and some green that will come on indoors, a bowl of cherry tomatoes that is nearly all ripe, the overgrown but still perfectly edible Merlin cucumbers, and that one ginormous Femspot from the top of the trellis. Whether it is still edible we will find out. If you fancy growing a giant cucumber for a competition, Femspot is your variety.
I am honestly shocked at how bushy the tomatoes have become. Every other year I had to top them because the supports could not cope. This is the first year I have let these indeterminate plants grow as they pleased, and there is still so much left up there.
In this video
- Trying out four pairs of gloves from CoolJobSafety, and the personal reason I always wear them
- Rain splitting the tomatoes, beans dying early and a pumpkin stem gone after a 30 degree summer
- Burlesca, Wizard of Oz, Totally Tangerine and Rhubarb and Custard dahlias bouncing back
- When is an Atomic chilli ripe, and can I move rooted pepper pots into the greenhouse?
- Rubylicious and Favorit stay, Sweet Aperitif is out
- Ten seeds for four pounds fifty, and why I am saving my own from now on
- Three more Small Sugar pumpkins cut down, five from one plant in total
- A basket of tomatoes, a bowl of cherries, Merlin cucumbers and one marrow sized Femspot
Things look a little tidier now, and the next jobs are clear. The beans are coming out so their rotten leaves stop blocking the low autumn sun from that corner, the second Femspot on the fence and the last of the courgette plant will follow, and then the old potato bed and the freed up pumpkin corner can be planted with the cabbages, broccoli and lettuce. Thank you again to CoolJobSafety for the gloves, and do go and have a look at Ali's channel if you are curious about seed saving. If you know your chillies, I would be grateful for your advice in the comments. See you in the next one.
You might also like
