Santa Rosa and friends

Eating Santa Rosa plums (have loads)

And the Moorpark apricots (not many this year)

Here are the lotus seedlings with their 'coin leaves' in their temporary growing-on home

Small boy in a big garden  

Yellow cherry tomatoes best for throwing, apparently (variety label lost)

Three x new-ish chicken bottoms (actually four, one not in shot)

New pond from the old bath. Sorry about the green, wrong setting on the phone! 

All good things

Rag ends of our only successful tomato crop: currant tomatoes. 

The Siberian Tomato Conspiracy

Source: google.com via Katie on Pinterest

These are not my Siberian Tomatoes, and this is not my picture, this is (was) just my dream: Tomatoes in winter! And this is what sucked me in:

"Tomatoes in 60 Days! Plants set fruit at low temperatures, Produce extra early yields, frost resistant, too! Siberian tomatoes really do come from Siberia, producing juicy, flavourful, smooth, round fruit up to 225g (1/2lb) in size as early as 60 days from setting out plants. The plants produce delicious tomatoes ahead of other varieties because Siberians do not require high temperatures to set fruit like other tomatoes - just a few degrees above freezing is all the warmth they need."

(From Australian Seeds, and I avoid promoting websites or products, but they have some interesting stuff and I must reference the quote!)

Way back in March I ordered some seed and sowed it in punnets. It all sprouted beautifully and it was very exciting. Then there was a toddler-related incident and I was left with four intact seedlings out of about 30, but never mind, these things happen. I potted the four babies on and slowly they grew, and later I planted two of them into pots, and the other two into a sheltered spot in the garden by the warmth of a north-south fence. One garden-planted tomato died immediately, the other struggled on. The two potted tomatoes have done marginally better, reaching a whopping four or five inches tall by now. They are nearly five months old, these plants, and will certainly not be flowering, let alone fruiting anytime soon.

The dream of winter tomatoes is gone, and even of spring tomatoes very much diminished, but I live in hope that we may get one or two tomatoes off a plant eventually (and in the meantime, I'll stick to summer cropping varieties!)



(Yes, I know I said I was going to talk about seed sowing this post, but I can't find the card-reader so my pictures are all stuck on my camera until I can locate the blasted thing.)

Three weeks left of winter, folks!

Tomato lovin'

My tomatoes - all various heritage Digger's varieties - seem to be the only thing in the garden at present not being gradually decimated by earwigs. All but one are doing beautifully (that 'one' got eaten right in the middle of the stem when it was small. It's hanging on, but I don't have high hopes for a recovery). They're all fairly compact bushes, lush and green. I adore the smell; pungent and humid, they smell like dust and hot North winds, of long slow Summer holidays and boredom.
Some of them are starting to get little yellow flowers, others are following closely behind with tiny hairy flower buds. I photographed a few of them, but even though I was looking closely it took me some time to notice that there are little fruit already on one of them, my 99c pot-bound bargain is well ahead of the pack.



I had a heritage tomato seed mix, also from Diggers', and I sprinkled some of the seeds in pots a few weeks ago and they are starting to sprout and look like proper mini-tomato plants already.


In other garden news, the yellow zucchinis have their first flowers, the capsicums have some small fruits, and some beans have sprouted and I'm hoping they will survive the voracious earwig population.




And some babies have appeared in compost heap. I suspect they might be pumpkins because they look like the pumpkin seedlings I planted a few weeks ago. I'm going to leave them and hope for the best. Free plants, woot!


Next post: attempting to deal with the earwigs!