Saturday, June 25, 2011
★★★★
pests
PROPERTY 11
Grow Your Own tomatoes
YOUR tomatoes should be growing fast now, especially with the warm spring we had. Some will already be producing flowers and needing tying in to their stakes at regular intervals. Regular watering – but not waterlogging – is vital. If you water spasmodically, drenching the plant one day and then leaving it to dry out, the fruits are likely to split at the bottom or you’ll get blossom-end rot, where the bottom of the fruit goes brown, hard and inedible. Water the soil, not the plant, as tomato leaves and stems hate getting wet. Continue to pinch out any shoots that
develop between stem and main branches, as they take up valuable energy from the developing fruit. Cut off the top of plants, certainly of outdoor ones, when six trusses of fruit have begun to set, to help concentrate the plant’s energies. Feed plants with a tomato feed high in potassium fertiliser when the plants are beginning to fruit. Be warned that allowing your tomato plants to sit in cold water in a plant saucer is likely to make them vulnerable to fungal diseases such as tomato blight, the bane of every tomato grower’s life.
3 ways to ... boost your raspberries
1
level.
Bury new plants a little deeper than their previous soil
2 fruiting.
Water well in dry weather, especially while flowering and
3
Propagate from healthy suckers growing away from the main plant.
Things to do this week
PROTECTION: A woman spraying plants in her garden to keep pests at bay
■ Water hanging baskets and containers daily to stop them drying out and deadhead your bedding plants regularly. ■ Prune early-flowering shrubs such as lilac and deutzia which have finished flowering. ■ Make a sowing of winter-flowering pansies for a display next winter or spring. ■ Remove growing points from early peas which have finished flowering to concentrate energies on pod production.
■ Boost gladioli with a liquid feed. ■ Remove young green gooseberries for cooking or preserving, leaving enough to mature for dessert. ■ Deadhead roses to encourage repeat flowering unless the roses are being grown for the colour and profusion of their hips. ■ Sow turnips to produce a crop in autumn. ■ Make sure pond levels are kept topped up.