Over a busy Bank Holiday weekend, Jo and I managed to grab a couple of hours to head down to Plot #59 and do a bit of planting out.
First in, Jo’s sunflowers:
Jo has grown three varieties this year: ‘Giant Single’, ‘Black Magic’ and ‘Ruby Red’. They might not look like much now, but come back in a couple of months and we should have a stunning display to show you.
Whilst Jo was tying her sunflowers in to their cane supports, I planted out a row of tomatoes:
These are a variety called ‘Legend Bush’, which I sourced from the Real Seed Catalogue. It’s described as an early-cropper, which helps it to avoid the dreaded blight, and is meant to do well outdoors in cooler conditions. Hopefully we’ll be picking a few of those in a month or so as well.
2 replies on “Now Planting Out: Sunflowers and Tomatoes”
I was incredibly late with my tomatoes – they got eaten by slugs, which put me three weeks behind.
Have you found that this has been a problem before?
I think it depends on how old the tomato plants are and what else is around. Slugs are usually put off from attacking mature plants by the hairy, fibrous tomato stems. But if the slugs can get at the tom plants while they’re still young, or if there isn’t much else around to attract their attention, then they might be more persistent than usual.
If you can grow the toms under cover to a decent size (around 12 ” – 18″) before planting them up then that might give them a better chance to develop those hairy defence mechanisms. That seems to be what works for us, anyhow. That, and a judicious application of ferrous phosphate slug pellets…