When thoughts turn to tomatoes
into the soil. Pinch off the bottom set of leaves on the stem and bury the roots and stem into the prepared soil up to the bottom leaves.
The plant will form new roots all along the buried stem and this will enable it to reach out and absorb more water and nutrients from the soil. Because tomatoes are heavy producers, they are also heavy feeders and drinkers. The compost and fertiliser added to the soil prior to planting will provide the plants with a steady diet, but that’s not enough for a summer-long harvest.
After planting, add a 7-10cm layer of organic mulch around your plants to conserve moisture and prevent weeds, which compete for nutrients. Then every two weeks, feed the plants with a balanced, water-soluble plant food mixed according to packet directions.
Once your plants begin to flower, switch to a specialist tomato fertiliser, which is high in potassium, to encourage more flowers and fruit. Lay off the highnitrogen fertiliser at this stage or you’ll encourage plants to produce leaves at the expense of fruit. Water regularly and consistently as well. If tomato plants receive too much water or too little, the fruit can develop a variety of problems, in particular blossom end rot, fruit split, and blotches.
Water your plants regularly – every day or second day in summer – to maintain a moist but not soggy soil. Container grown plants will need daily watering.
As plants develop, pinch off some of the side shoots that form in the ‘‘V’’ where the leaf stems meet the main stem.
It’s not necessary to remove all the laterals, but doing so keeps plants tidy and directing the nutrients to the remaining leaves and fruit.
But remember, in hot areas, foliage cover during hot summers is beneficial. Fruit that is subjected to extreme heat and sunshine, without adequate water and foliage cover, can burn, resulting in white or yellow patches.
If you water well, feed well, and keep picking your produce, you’ll have a successful crop of tomatoes this summer.
Visit Jane’s blogs: sweetlivingmagazine.co.nz and flamingpetal.co.nz. I am a prodigiously messy person who justifies said mess because I’m ‘‘creative’’ and ‘‘work better’’ in chaos, who has had the fortune of partnering – and loving dearly – an extremely orderly, tidy and dare I say, borderline fuss-pot person.
Here are some of my crimes – not putting the lids on any container, not closing cupboard doors, half-drunk cups of tea left in curious places around the home, my ‘‘bed-drobe’’, wet towels left on the floor, and the piles of documents I have ‘‘filed’’ by putting into tidy little piles.
My boyfriend is the kind of man who colour codes his socks, spreadsheets all of our holidays, and finds unbridled joy in storage solutions. I adore him.
But the fact of the matter is we are basically fundamentally different when it comes to our tolerance for disorder. Which is not an insignificant thing – it’s always the little things that start to grate on you and become a problem in your home and relationship.
And indeed, much has been written about housework as the final feminist frontier.
Women mostly do more cleaning than men. The real problem is not so much because they wanted a cleaner home, but because they know that they will be judged more harshly than men for keeping a messy one. As Arlie Hochschild told Jessica Grose in a 2013 article on the issue in New Republic, ‘‘Letting the house go is in a way letting something deeper go. . . . You get a sense of safety in an orderly home.’’
Even if the division of labour in your home is an egalitarian one and not one fraught with the oppression of gendered roles etc, there needs to be a negotiation between the different standards that dwelling sharers may have. Especially