Garden shorts
According to Garden Trade News, almost my favourite bedside reading, sales of the liquid fertiliser, ‘Tomorite’, are up markedly this year. Where there is ‘Tomorite’, there must be amateur tomato growers, since this high-potash feed is what every kitchen gardener uses to encourage the young fruits to grow and ripen satisfactorily. A rise in sales is tangible evidence, if such were needed, that gardeners have become very keen on growing edible produce this year, as the economic gloom deepens and people scramble to find cheap, but still agreeable, things to do outside at weekends.
At the same time, Suttons Seeds have announced that they are making 2009 ‘The Year of the Tomato’, with promotions in garden centres, the introduction of a prolific, grape-sized tomato variety called ‘Hundreds and Thousands’, and the sale of a special tomato ‘superfeed’, whose chemical analysis is different, though not that different, from ‘Tomorite’.
All I hope is that this summer’s lack of warm sun, which adversely affected the taste of most tomatoes, together with the damp, humid conditions, which promoted the spread of tomato blight so efficiently, will not have conspired together to put off those newly enthusiastic vegetable gardeners for life.
Ursula Buchan
Previous page
