But wait ...there's more!

With an unseasonably warm early Autumn, the tomatoes are still going and the strawberries are having a second flush. We just leave the apples on the tree until they drop.

Tonnes of Top Tasty Tomatoes

Well, not quite tonnes. But kilos and kilos. I made two mistakes with tomatoes this season - I got them in the ground too late for our slightly shorter mountains summer and I viciously pruned them to allow large fruit to get larger - I did this too late and lost lots of baby tomatoes. But despite all that, we have extra tomatoes for sauces/pickles or soup to eat and store, with a few green ones to ripen or pickle.

Typical morning sweep's harvest:




unripe Rouge De Marmande (above) and Martino's Red Roma (below)


And of course there were some for the slugs to enjoy!


I tried quite a few varieties this year for fun. I also planted some seeds saved from last season. Most worked and one looked like it had crossed and had weird-looking fruit (a failed beefsteak).

All up I planted Black Russian, Cream Sausage, Martino's Red Roma, Roma, Amish Paste, Tommy Toe, Rouge De Marmande and some cherry tomatoes in a pot by the back door. The Tommy Toe fruited prolifically and tasted lovely but I was surprisingly more taken with the (yellow) Cream Sausage that had a firm and quite sweet (less acidic) flesh. I also loved the Rouge De Marmande - a perfect mix of firm, juicy, tasty and sizeable.


Mostly Tommy Toes (small round), Rouge De Marmande (large ones on right)


(Above) Tommy Toe (top), (L-R) Cream Sausage, Martino's Red Roma, Amish Paste
and below a small Rouge De Marmande, Cream Sausage and Black Russian.

And below the lovely and striking difference in texture and colour of these three (shown with chopped up squash)


There are supposedly around 7500 varieties of tomatoes to choose from in the world!! A far cry from the few varieties sold in stores. So far I still prefer the Amish Paste to the Roma for taste and texture, the Rouge De Marmande and Black Russian for good performance in cooler climates, juicy, tasty flesh and long-yields, and Cream Sausage for sweetness and chunky, firm texture. The Tommy Toes are good for ridiculously large numbers of large juicy cherry-like tomatoes with a slightly acidic flavour.

Honestly, you could spend your whole gardening life just trying different tomatoes!

Amusingly, according to Wikipedia, the country known for its famous pasta sauces and love of tomatoes grew only 17% of the number of tomatoes that China grew in 2008.

To mulch or not to mulch?

To prepare my tomato patch this year, I grew some green manure for a few months and then dug it in (L) and covered with pea straw (R).

When I dug over the patch ready for planting only a couple of months later the soil was like moist, light chocolate cake (L below). I dug over the brassica bed that I had left unmulched and you can see how much drier the soil (R below) is and less rich after the enthusiastic broccoli, rocket and bok choi had finished with it!



Now I have some happy tomatoes (below) growing in the mulched patch and have installed a drip line that runs off a gravity-feed water system (ie low pressure), so I can use some of our tank water up the back of the garden that is higher up the slope. It saves water and I'm a lazy gardener! The whole veggie patch is on slightly downward-sloping land, so the drip line runs perpendicular to the slope and the water drips through very nicely along the whole 15m line. Mind you, I actually need a second line to cover my whole patch, although the potatoes are doing fine without special treatment.

Tomatoes galore!

I had a successful first summer season of tomatoes. Having grown green manure in late winter and spring and mixed it with horse poo, the patch was ready to jump! I'll try mustard in the green manure next time as it specifically kills organisms that bother tomatoes.

Of course the piccies look nice but there were a few tomatoes lost to fruit fly, giant slugs and even the local female Bower bird! Even so, we did not have to buy tomatoes all through summer and even the first month of autumn.

I grew three types: L-R: Black Russian, Amish Paste and Beefsteak.

The Black Russian tomatoes grew really well - not super-high yields but consistent yields for many months - maybe because the seeds were saved from a friend's patch from last year who lives in the next suburb and so has a similar climate.

One of the early beefsteak tomatoes just grew and grew - I'm not actually sure it wasn't some kind of wierd 'throwback', but I saved its seeds and I'll see what grows next summer.

Giant mutant beefsteak tomato... the one on the right! :-)

Oi! Get OFF my veggies!

I thought this was the work of possums, but I caught giant slugs in the act and found slug slime on the tomatoes.

Our first and only spaghetti squash (like a sweet zucchini) was pecked by our local female bower bird.

These little critters nibbled on some tomatoes and pumkpin leaves.
We also had pumpkin beetles, and this green critter on the pumpkins.

Summer season meals

Though I didn't plant enough zucchini this year, there was still enough even on one plant to have with several meals (above - spinach, beetroot greens, tomatoes, zucchini, chilli, sage, lemon verbena and some cape gooseberries for dessert). This made a nice pasta sauce!



Some zucchini got a bit excited after a lot of rain!:

Tomayto Tomahto

A lovely 'family' of Russian Black tomatoes:

The juicy 'flesh':

And what crazy weather can do to your tomatoes - these tomatoes cracked after extreme hot weather, deep watering and then days of cold and rain:

So far I have picked nearly 4kg tomatoes and they are really only beginning to ripen! And there are still many babies on the plants :)

Vegetable Art

I pulled some lovely tomatoes out of the garden today, along with lettuce and a pretty zucchini flower:

I decided to water the tomatoes less and they were not so humungous this time but juicy and very tasty! Though they are Russian Black tomatoes, they look quite bright red.

Seed Saving

As well as finding much enthusiasm for fruit and vegetable gardening, I have begun seed-saving. Don't know where that came from except maybe a deep desire to recycle!

So far I have saved dill seeds, mustard leaf seeds, sage seeds, Russian Black tomato seeds (and some "Granny's Bonnet" (aquilegia) seeds - not a veggie, but very pretty with easy-to-spot seed pods). I dunno if its a response to the 'GFC' (Global Financial Crisis) but there are a lotta people going back to growing their own food. I now have very healthy Russian Black tomato plants from a neighbour's tomatoes from last year - my first seed-saved babies!

I never took much notice of seed pods of plants before. Now they look like gold to me. Next to water and healthy soil, they are the most precious 'commodity' we have.

Above: Russian Black tomatoes (green :))

Below: Mustard seed pods & Dill seed 'umbrels'

Some advantages of saving seeds are that you know the life of the seed's parent and what has been put on the soil (or not - eg. no yukky chemicals or sprays) and by growing well, it may have adapted to its local microclimate and have offspring happy to grow in the same area. And of course it gives you propagation power!

I have been using a book called "The Seedsavers' Handbook", but I have also joined a local seedsaving group to swap seeds and tips.

You can't let everything go to seed at once. For example nearly all brassicas (mustard, bok choi, cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, brussels sprouts, etc) will cross with each other, so the offspring may not be what you expect!

All-in-all very satisfying and an exercise in patience as seed pods may take months to grow and dry on the plant.