Grafted Tomato a Turbo Veg

We don’t really eat fresh tomatoes in this house, and as a rule I don’t tend to grow them. Last year I was tempted by a trio of unusual flavoured tomatoes from Wyevale, but they were tall and needy things that wanted constant watering. I didn’t notice any significant difference between the flavours of the ones we did eat; I gave most of the fruit away. When I had a juicer I would grow cherry tomatoes and make tomato juice; the chickens loved the leftover pulp. (And yes, if you juice yellow tomatoes you get yellow tomato juice.)

Later this year, when the XROOTS experiment comes to an end, NASA’s Veggie growing system will be starting a new challenge. VEG-05 is a long-awaited trial of whether we can grow tomatoes in space – in this case, the dwarf variety Red Robin.

When it comes to garden gear, there is a clear divide among growers: Those who love tomato cages, and those who consider them an absolute useless eyesore. I’m controversially the latter. Aesthetics aside, there are a lot of questions I have about the invention of this particular metal torture device, and I have opinions about how it might not be the best way to grow your tomatoes. In fact, there are a lot of things that can go wrong with your crops due to cage structure—increased pests and lower fruit production to start! 

Growing Tomatoes from Tomato Slices is the easiest way to have your own specimens. The best part is, you can do it from store brought tomatoes and then relish fresh harvest right at your home!

The key to getting the most productive tomato plants is to plant the right companions with them. Read this article to find out which are the best Tomato Companion Plants!

It is a regular debate whether you should leave your tomato leaves on the plant or snap them off. For intermediate varieties I am strongly in the ‘get them off camp!’

The last of my root vegetables and Leeks are now consumed and a distant gastronomic memory. New baby salad leaves have been available but I do not take enough care to be able to binge on them until later in the season. Rhubarb once again is prolific and abundant so that I and the neighbours are enjoying the fruit of my labours literally.

‘Organic Fruit and Vegetable Gardeners Year, The A Seasonal Guide to Growing What You Eat’ by Graham Clarke

Think before you allow poppies to proliferate. Poppies rob a lot of goodness from your soil.

After salad crop failures in Spain and shortages of courgettes, broccoli and other ‘long distance’ vegetables gardeners could to worse than focus on traditional and non-traditional root crops.

This is one of the many books in my collection but the only one to focus on growing big, bigger and biggest vegetables. If you want to grow giant vegetable for exhibition or to get large crops then there are many pointers in ‘How to Grow Giant Vegetables’ by Bernard Lavery and below.

Grafting in the 19th century was a significant method of increasing stock of trees and plants as the photograph of East Anglian life by PH Emerson shows.  The objects of Grafting are to bring a bush or tree into an earlier fruiting than it would do naturally; to produce good fruit from an inferior plant; or to save space by putting dwarf scions on to rampant growing trees. The stock or subject is the base tree and the scion or graft is the portion of the branch to be imported.