I didn’t kill the tomatoes!

What seems like months ago now, I had a go at planting some tomatoes (mainly because I had bought a little set of salad seeds from Tesco last year on the basis that they looked cute and were in the sale)

I profess to not having a single green fingered cell in my body, so took the approach that if I chucked it in and something happened, it would still have been cheaper than buying tomatoes on the first place so nothing ventured and all that.  After chucking in, getting some little green shoots and deciding at some point to repot them into something bigger, because I had a vague inkling that that was what you were meant to do, I just sort of left them to their own devices.

Nothing really happened for a while, mainly because I wasn’t really watering them enough (well, it was earlier in the year when England was stuck in its ‘why is it not summer yet’ doldrums and it seemed a bit over kill to bother) but I did eventually acquire a watering can and have given them a sprinkling every so often, which has meant they’ve grown so tall that they can barely hold themselves up. I put a massive bit of stick in the pot with them but haven’t gotten around to tying them to it yet, but they seem to be happy enough being propped up.

I also had a vague idea that you’re meant to take off any side shoots, possibly so the plant can concentrate on growing tomatoes, rather than loads of leaves, but having no idea what a side shoot is, I’ve just been pulling off random leaves willy nilly.  I mean, surely everything is a side shoot… Does that mean you’re just meant to end up with one stem with one leaf on it? Because that seems a bit silly.

I toyed with the idea of feeding them, even going as far as to buy liquid tomato feed, but the instructions on the bottle said something mad like ‘take one gallon of water’ and having no idea how much a gallon would be off the top of my head, I got bored and didn’t bother.

I did have a bit of a hairy moment when the plants seemed to be attracting millions of tiny little flies, but I took the non-organic approach and bought some bug killer.  They seem to have disappeared now!

And finally, I went out to the garden yesterday to give them a little drink and lo and behold! There were some teeny little green tomatoes! No saying yet whether they will ever get big enough to eat, or ripe enough not to give you the shits but for now at least, I feel a small amount of progress has been made

How does your garden grow

Poorly, would be the answer to that question!  When we first viewed our house it was in the middle of summer, the garden looked glorious and the old owner had obviously spent a lot of time making it look just so. As we left after the second viewing, Mark and I both looked at each other and declared that that poor man’s garden would not know what had hit it when we moved in! As we moved in November, thankfully we’ve not really had to do anything but as the weather’s got a tiny bit warmer, and the grass got ever-longer, it was time to take action!

Seizing the opportunity of a couple of days off work, we bit the bullet, took a trip to the dump with what seemed like several thousand creepy lawn ornaments (like the dog that looked like it had cataracts, and the humping squirrels) and went to Homebase to buy a lawnmower. After several confused minutes, Mark showed me how to turn the flipping thing on, and off I went. About 5 minutes and 50 yards later, Mark said I was making it look far too much like hard work, so he zoomed off and I took to phase two of my non-green-fingered day- Vegetables!

look at me go!

Last year, towards the end of the summer, I spied in Tescos a little tray, with a bag of compost and some packets of seeds for a bargaintastic 50p. As it was too late in the year to plant anything, everything sat in a cupboard, surviving two house moves, before finally being put to use today

50p!! A bargain!

Now, I should explain, I come from a long line of non-green-fingered people, and thus have absolutely no idea what I’m doing, but I followed the instructions on the kit, which basically involved opening up the bag of compost, putting most of that in the green tray, opening the seed packets, and sprinkling them into a third each of the tray, toping with the rest of the compost, a bit of a water and bunging the lid back on. It’s not looking the most inspiring at the moment, being basically just a box of mud, but I shall see how I go- If anything happens, I’m going to be amazed quite frankly, because if growing veg was that easy, everyone would be doing it, wouldn’t they! Oh, also, I got little labels in the box, so I put one where I thought I’d put the seeds but I may have spun the box round at some point so possibly might get lettuce where I think I should have tomatoes. Exiting times!!