David Lifton
The hot weather has helped the tomatoes this year...
The onions and potatoes have been lackluster for me this year. It appears that this is a problem across my allotment site. I hear and see gardeners stressing about their small potato yields, and the blazing heat is mostly to blame. Whereas, in previous years, sacks and buckets have been brimming with the tubers – my harvest this year barely reached the top of one large pot. For me, the onions were only grown as a space-filler this year. My initial thought was to focus on the more expensive vegetables such as squashes and beans to save myself money while growing my own food. Yet, there is a lot to be said about crops with long shelf-lives in your larders and cupboards. I used to ask myself whether it was worth growing a certain vegetable over another. Of course, prioritise what you enjoy growing – however, my philosophy, to grow food that’s free of chemicals, that’s extremely local and above all, fresher than anything in the supermarkets, now drives me to grow everything that I can. Onions might be inexpensive in the supermarkets – yet, if you were to put a price on your homegrown crops, without mileage and with better soil – the true saving would be huge. And so, with this new perspective, moving into the next growing season, I will be putting a much larger focus on my onion crops. The potatoes will also make an appearance, albeit as a baby crop to allow me time to grow leeks or brassicas later in the season. A more positive effect of this abnormally warm summer is that my tomatoes are coming along beautifully. While the laterplanted plum tomato Follia crops hold fruits barely out of infancy – the Mountain Magic tomatoes I have growing outdoors are covered in ruby treats. So far, I’ve counted 60 fruits on the seven vines. If the hot weather makes a comeback and extends into September, there may be a chance to see more from these plants. Though, with this abundance of juicy, medium-sized tomatoes, I’m already counting this year as a fantastic year for them. When I consider the previous three years were full of blighted vines and small crops – inspecting this healthy yield and picking the ripe fruits as I go – I’m overwhelmed with joy. This is what growing your own food is all about.