Things to do on a wet day

Thursday 19th July 2012

 Paperwork

Ironing 

 Cleaning

Catch up with the blog

Get wet

Plan for dry days

Cook, bake, preserve

Buy things on the internet

Write lists of things to do on wet days

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomato.
I have abandoned all hope of getting the polytunnel up in the near future.
This is a problem. For the greenhouse, until a couple of days ago, was full of tomatoes, aubergines, peppers, cucumbers and chillis. And all waiting to go into the polytunnel which is in 28 boxes in the stables!

I just love the idea of loads of colours, shapes and flavours of tomato and pepper, crops which we use day in day out and would use more of if we had them. Tomatoes, especially, are easy to store through the winter, made into sauces or passata.
After a shaky start with damping off and a second sowing, a few seeds of each variety has eventually yielded an awful lot of plants. But stuck in seed trays and not getting anywhere near enough light or heat in the greenhouse, all my indoor crops have been languishing.

Tomatoes and asparagus make
good companions

I reached this same stage last year, when I eventually planted most of the toms outside and crossed my fingers! It worked well and we had a good crop, even if we had to ripen quite a lot hung upside down indoors. Blight will be more of a threat this year, but nevertheless my straggly plants have again been put outside to cope. Already, after just a couple of days, they seem a little stronger, their roots free to spread and their leaves exposed to full light and a healthy breeze.

Tomatoes and gooseberries

like each other too.

I read that tomatoes do well planted with asparagus, in particular that the toms deter asparagus beetle. Somewhere else I read that tomatoes and gooseberries are good companions.

So that's where many of them have gone.

Hopefully when summer comes I'll be posting images of baskets full of ripe, multicoloured tomatoes.

Space in the greenhouse
I started this post with a list of things to do in the rain. I left out pottering in the polytunnel, but in its absence the greenhouse became a rather smaller alternative today. A mixture of peat-free growbags, pots and straw bales now house my crops which will hopefully start to grow now that they have space and light.

And with things a lot less cluttered I'll be able to track down the slugs which have totally decimated every single basil seedling as soon as it has germinated.

A compact space for my greenhouse crops.
But do they have time to set fruit and ripen
after a very slow start?

p.s. A Ray of Hope
When I vowed never again to moan about the rain, along came four months of rain. As I finish writing this post in which I abandon all hope of getting the polytunnel up, what should appear on the horizon but a five day forecast for high pressure, light winds and warm temperatures! When I was a child, whenever I asked "are we nearly there?" the destination was "always just around the next corner." I've learned to wait until I see before I believe.