Staying in
In a vege popularity contest the wonder plant wins hands down, says garden guru
Have a guess. What do you think is the most popular vege among gardeners? Potatoes? Green beans? Scorzonera? Well, maybe not scorzonera … My guess is tomatoes. This wonder plant is so popular that it’s difficult to see how we could manage without it. It evolved from a cherry tomato of the variety cerasiforme, which can be found wild in Ecuador, Peru and nearby countries. It was thought to have been domesticated in Mexico, from where the Spaniards took it to Europe in the early 16th century. In the early days it was called the love apple, golden apple or Peruvian apple. In Canterbury, I no longer bother to grow it outside — too much wind and too many southerly snaps — but my glasshouse and tunnel house do me fine. I envy where you do your gardening; in the top two thirds of the North Island, growing toms in the open air is fine, though a sheltered spot ideally against a sunny wall really helps.
Tomatoes grow rapidly and do like a good supply of kai, in the form of the good old NPK mix in the ratio of 2: 3: 2. You can buy bags or bottles of this high- priced mix but it’s much cheaper to make your own by buying sulphate of ammonia, superphosphate and sulphate of potash and mixing them more or less in those ratios. A little Epsom salts provides the magnesium. Don’t add lime; same goes for potatoes, so don’t plant them — or tomatoes — where your limed brassicas sustained you all winter. Add lots of compost — any type — at planting time.
What about the perennial, vexing questions of what varieties to grow? Every gardener seems to have opinions, based on years of experience. Taste is the usual deciding factor and it’s true that thick slices of beefsteak tomato on an oliveoily warm and toasted slice of very good ciabatta bread is a true culinary delight, especially with a few fresh basil leaves and some Marlborough sea salt. Add a couple of crushed anchovy fillets ( from a can) below the tomato slice and you will reach a state of savoury sublimity ( Pretentious, moi?!). Tomato, goat’s cheese and basil go together beautifully too. Recently, I checked the number of tomato varieties offered in the catalogues of Kings and Egmont Seeds. Between them there were nearly 100 types. I used to savour the prospects of growing from seed such fascinating things as Honeybee, Vintage Wine, Thessaloniki, and Sub- arctic Plenty, but I don’t. I buy plants from our local farmers market and I ( almost) don’t care what varieties are on sale in a particular week. Whatever I grow, the flavour is a knockout and their relationship to the bland, hard supermarket tomatoes is so distant we could be convinced they are a different plant species. You can save six weeks or more by using bought plants and if they fail, buy a few more and replace them instantly. Sowing more seeds at that point leads to a depressing delay. Mind you, I just noticed seeds being offered of a variety called Winter Grape. Grappoli d’Inverno is its Italian name. They start slowly but soon catch up and these late- season fruits, still on their vines, can be hung upside down in a dry shed and picked for ages or dried in situ and relished in the darker months. All this euphoric dreaming of tasty tomato delights to come might, however, receive a bleak wakeup call in your garden if the dreaded bug, the introduced virus- transmitting tomato- potato psyllid ( TPP) hits your toms. It attacks all plants in the potato family and losses can be depressingly severe. What to do? Spray like mad is an obvious option but I won’t; a new tiny, harmless, TPP- attacking parasitic wasp is soon to be released into this country. How long will it be, I wonder, before it’s available for release into our home tomato and potato crops? Steve Wratten is professor of biodiversity at Lincoln University