Kitchen Gardener Rob Smith is keeping an eye on his crops and sowing a fancy kale
The time has come for me to finally start moving plants around and getting some larger tomatoes into the unheated greenhouse. My first ones are now pretty big in their 2L pots, so they’ll have to fend for themselves in the cooler conditions of a greenhouse without heat. That said, I do have a small gas heater and a roll of fleece ready in case the forecast is for an arctic blast!
I’ve added well-rotted manure to the troughs in the greenhouse that will be home to my tomatoes and I’ve been watering it lightly in the mornings for the last couple of weeks. Hopefully this will have allowed the sun to warm the moist compost/topsoil mix, ready for the plants to go straight in. Before I plant them I’ll be removing the larger, lower sideshoots that I’ve allowed to grow long; this is because I’ll be creating new plants from these by leaving them in a glass of water until roots form. Once your cutting has roots, you just pot it up like any regular tomato seedling and you have a free plant that’s exactly the same as its mother plant (this works really well for more expensive F1 tomato seed when you only get a few in a packet).
As the tomatoes go into the greenhouse, the citrus trees go out into the garden for the summer. Hopefully this will allow birds to clean any scale insect off the trees, which always seem to suffer undercover in the winter. I’ll be moving them around the patio area so that their exquisite fragrance can bring a sense of the Med to the garden in the warmer months. When I move the trees outside I also
Another fruit I’m checking on is my greenhouse and outside grapes; they need to have their vines secured to the supports if they’ve come loose, and it’s worth replacing any worn ties or string now so the weight of the fruit doesn’t snap them and damage the plant in the coming months.
There are a few veg varieties I’m sowing this week too; I’m starting my corn in root trainers and some ‘Cottagers’ kale. This old variety is a cross between a kale, Brussels sprout and purple-sprouting broccoli, resulting in tasty leaves, which are followed by a crop of loose Brussels sprout/broccoli type sideshoots. I’m sowing in the unheated greenhouse in modules as I would with other kale, then planting out in a few weeks when large enough to handle. ‘Cottagers’ kale doesn’t have any special growing needs, so it’s just the same as any other
kale you may have grown, yet you get two crops from the one plant!