I keep on going on about how to try and deal with the glut of tomatoes, mainly freezing as tomatoes or sauce but this tomato soup recipe has two advantages. Firstly it uses a good quantity of fresh tomatoes and it also uses carrot thinnings to produce an excellent lunch. Regardless of how careful I…… Continue reading Tomatoes & Carrot Thinnings for Soup
Category: Blog
Today’s Harvest (August 2022)
The family have been here for the past week so it’s been difficult to know exactly how things are going. We had a heavy thunderstorm which broke the hot dry weather and, hopefully, will mean that some of the beans and courgettes will set and grow. It doesn’t affect the tomatoes because I have been…… Continue reading Today’s Harvest (August 2022)
Flying Ant Day 2022
This year has been a bad year for blackfly, made worse (in our garden at least) by the fact that they are moved around from one plant to another by ants. They started on the broad beans which they forced me to harvest earlier than usual so they were smaller and migrated to the dwarf…… Continue reading Flying Ant Day 2022
First Tomato Harvest 2022
Today I decided that the tomatoes were starting to get ripe enough to warrant picking a few. As usual the cherry tomatoes are the first with Oleron Yellow, Red Berry, Garnet, Koralik Red Cherry & Indigo Cherry Drops making up the majority of fruit by number. However, the weight was mainly from standard red tomatoes…… Continue reading First Tomato Harvest 2022
Effects of Dry Weather
The weather this week has been hot, dry and windy. As a result, whilst the plants in the greenhouses are doing well and the tomatoes are starting to ripen in quantity, all the outside plants are suffering and need copious amounts of water. Even so, the runner beans have lost all their flowers and no…… Continue reading Effects of Dry Weather
Elephant Hawkmoth
Whilst described by my Field Guide as ” one of the more common European hawkmoths”, I don’t remember ever seeing one before. This dead specimen was on the floor of one of our greenhouses. I’ll have to keep a watch out for the caterpillars because they can be voracious eaters of both the plants and…… Continue reading Elephant Hawkmoth
2022 – End of June Status
So here we are approaching the end of June (which means we’re past midsummer and on our way to Autumn) the garden and vegetables are beginning to be productive and I’m making the record of what we’re harvesting. The tomatoes are all growing well and have small fruit growing on them. I have a feeling…… Continue reading 2022 – End of June Status
Blue Tits Successfully Fledged – 2022
In my last post about the Blue Tits the parents were dashing backwards and forwards feeding their young. Well, now they’ve gone. A couple of days ago, it was apparent that the youngster (I never saw more than one) was preparing itself to depart and its parents were sitting some way away calling to it…… Continue reading Blue Tits Successfully Fledged – 2022
Busy Blue Tits – 2022
Sitting quietly in the garden I watched the Blue Tits dashing in and out of the birdbox. They were delivering food to their young family hopping in and out about every ten minutes (or less). Its virtually impossible to get a still picture as they hop around for a few moments before leaping into the…… Continue reading Busy Blue Tits – 2022
Planting out Tomatoes – 2022
So, the plants have got to the stage where they’re large enough to plant out. I grow my tomatoes in a couple of small greenhouses (since my polytunnel failed last year) in “Morissons Flower Buckets (MFBs)”. (For those of you who don’t know about them, Morissons is a UK supermarket and one of the things…… Continue reading Planting out Tomatoes – 2022