Garden Favourites in Summer

Happy New Year!



A couple of old favourites have bobbed up again this week. By chance Kerry proudly showed me a couple of Tomato plants I had taken home. I delivered these "spotty" plants and said I was keen to see if we could out grow the bacterial spec once the plants were in the ground. The Boss has done the rest very successfully and very simply. Cleaned off the infected foliage and top dressed around the plants with about a shovel per plant of Chook litter (litter, not raw poo). They are growing vigorously now, about 1m tall each. That's it! I'd prefer this wasn't an issue but I'm still getting questions about spots on Tomato leaves so it's nice to be able to say there is a practical solution.

The other favourite is

I was just wondering if you have any idea why I rarely ever get any female flowers on my pumpkins?  Is there a particular nutrient that produces female flowers?  I get plenty of male, but they're not that useful without the females!

Warmest regards

Sherilee

I checked with Dangerous Don who confirmed this is a common and inconsistent problem and recommended we just wait. I also checked back on my previous Newsletters and discovered I have written about it previously! Any way I had delayed answering Sherilee about a week and by the time I had suggested "pruning" the Pumpkin tentacles, 6 female flowers had appeared of their own accord. My theory is Pumpkins and other Cucurbits wait for a check to their growth before deciding it's time to reproduce. That could be the weather getting hot or someone amputating a few limbs.

Best wishes for a safe, prosperous and Happy New Year.

The Definitive Pumpkin Solution!

On making pumpkins etc. produce female flowers I learnt from experience that you need to take the ends off the leaders, thus producing more laterals. I discovered this when I had a feral pumpkin that grew in the compost heap years ago. Only had male flowers on 15 foot leaders that were threatening to take over the garden, so I went round the bush with a shovel chopping the "arms" off to about 4 feet. Voila! - laterals covered in female flowers! I seem to remember I got about 20 pumpkins from one vine. So now I'm brutal with them, but make up for it with LOTS of compost and horse manure.Jenny
How good is that!  Thank you Jenny, I'm happy to call that the definitive Cucurbit growing tip.  I'm sure you can't get simple, practical advice like this from a Google search (well, hopefully you can now).

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I also received this question during the week:
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While we have been eating our own tomatoes for the last month (& they are very tasty), the ones in pots (which were doing OK) have all developed circular splits around the fruit & I don't know how or when it happened. Obviously they can't be fixed & luckily many of them are still edible. I think I probably didn't keep heeding your feeding advice, & will try to do better next year.

As I only have 2 smallish plots (about 2m x 1m each), rotating my crops is a bit of an issue. Can you offer any thoughts?

Deirdre"

Follow this link to the original pic on filkr.com

The concentric splits are unfortunately all too common, along with long radial splits don the sides of Tomato fruit.  This is what we call a disorder, not a disease.  Tomato fruit development responds to varying growing conditions with bursts of growth followed by less active periods, a bit like my son Ben at the moment (fortunately he's not cracking, just stretching).  Some varieties, frequently heirloom varieties are much more prone to this problem than others.  It appears that plants that mature their fruit hidden in the foliage are less susceptible.

Older (50's & 60's I guess) seed catalogues made a big deal over the resistance to splitting and cracking of the latest varieties.  We see much less of this today because it is generally assumed that this won't be a problem with modern hybrids.

As mentioned cracking is not a disease and the plants are perfectly edible as Deirdre has found. The only problem is that the cracks can provide an entrance for a disease infection so the fruit can go off more quickly.  Of course this leads to the old argument over the relative benefits of modern hybrids and their open pollinated predecessors.  Keep in mind the breeders of the Heirloom varieties pretty much ignored anything but flavour, hybrids are often accused of ignoring flavour in the search for the benefits of long storage.

OK, that's part one of Deirdre's question.  How can crops be rotated if there is only a limited space available for growing.  My real expertise is in growing in containers, so this isn't an issue I regularly face.  If you have any good suggestions I would love your feedback.  Please send me an email or leave a comment on my blog and I'll reward feedback with a tray of vegie seedlings (Um, well that's if I can get them to you. Victoria, Australia works).