The tomatoes have been sown (early March), potted on, molly coddled when they started and eventually planted out into their final spaces in the greenhouse (early April). However, the cold, dull weather seems to be making it hard work for them to grow on as strongly as I would like.
All the indeterminate varieties are tall and weak with some of them 1m tall before the first truss (and even then the truss isn’t very vigorous. I can only put the height down to lack of sunshine early on in the season as (I don’t think) I treated them any different to normal (except that I might have moved them into 9cm pots a little earlier than normal which would give them more space to grow).
Then, when they have got going the first fruit are around two weeks later than my records show for previous years – again I suppose its due to the cold and lack of sunshine. I suppose it could also be due to a lack of insects to pollinate them but the trusses (where they have fruit) seem to be quite full.
This seems to be a common thing across all my vegetables. The first sowing of many things (beans, courgettes, carrots, swiss chard, beetroot and even radishes) have struggled to get started abd even when they have, they’re sparse and fighting to get going. The only things that seem to be doing well are potatoes where we’ve had a reasonable crop so far.
Somewhat surprisingly (having said that) the strawberries are not doing badly with a handful each morning to go with our cereal. Even so, I’m forced to leave them to give them a chance to fully ripen which gives the slugs and snails more opportunity to get at them and give the woodlice a way in.
What its made me do is sow/plant more so if the weather does brighten up I have no doubt we’ll be inundated as normal, such is vegetable gardening.
Have fun everyone.