It’s great being on the Web and seeing posts from around the world. The gardening blogs and posts from the Northern Hemisphere have swung into Spring preparation, which includes getting your tomato seeds sprouting indoors, but it turns out that for us here in northern New South Wales the garden advice is to plant tomatoes too.
The reason for us to sow is different though. Our mild Winter allows tomatoes to survive, which means we can grow them all year, but the cooler and drier weather means they have less disease load. My summer tomatoes got pretty hammered by the relentless warm rain we have. The leaves turned to mush and the fruit cracked and rotted. Most of the plants survived though and are now having a new flush of leaves and fruit, but they are a bit leggy, so a fresh lot of plants might allow me to quit the old beds and rotate the crop.
Apart from trusted expert sources like Jeremy Coleby-Williams, Nature is also indicating that it’s a good time to sow tomatoes. Here cherry tomatoes tend to self-sow all over the place, and these random plants make a handy extension to the main crop. A few weeks ago the new season of self-sown cherry tomato seedlings appeared, and they are growing at quite a rate.
Unfortunately this lot are not in an ideal spot. We are building an ornamental garden there, but they aren’t in the way yet and I’ll try not to let them get too leggy.
Meanwhile I have the next main crop coming along in a new system. I have been sowing single seeds into peat pots in the shade house to get them started while their new bed settles down. I have five varieties (Mayan Indian, Green Zebra, Burnley Bounty, Thai Pink Egg, and a beefsteak type that was supposed to be Black Russian) so sowed five pots roughly fortnightly.
I moved them to the polycarbonate greenhouse to acclimatise them to bright light and heat, then planted out the twelve successful pots.
If this warm weather keeps up for another month we should be in line for a good winter crop.