The Charming Nook

Hello and welcome back to my blog 🙂

Today’s post is to show you the cherry tomato plants that I have been growing this year.

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I was late with sowing my cherry tomatoes this year. I only got round to sowing them in late Spring, indoors, and to my surprise they germinated well and I have been looking after them and potting them on since.

I last potted them on in mid-June, when they had filled their plugs:

I set each plug deep into their new pots:

I had planned on growing the tomatoes in large grow bags in the greenhouse, but I decided they would take up too much space in there and I want to continue increasing my supply of plants through propagation and also keep sowing seeds.

Therefore, last weekend, I spent an afternoon preparing an area in the garden for growing the tomatoes. As you can see, I had to clear the area first; we unfortunately have a large amount of old compost sacks, filled with rubble we have dug up and accumulated from working in the garden. We are slowly getting rid of the rubble sacks.

I simply moved the sacks further down and cleared the area for the tomatoes. As you can see, it is a messier area of the garden at the moment, but it will be cleared up over time. Here are the grow bags half filled:

I filled the fabric grow bags with some old soil that was in a builder’s sack; this soil came from digging up the grass at the front of the house throughout 2023. I previously layered the grass in two builder’s sacks and they have been left to decompose since then. It has produced really lovely loamy soil, with plenty of worms and nutrients. I ended up using up the remainder of one of the sacks, so now we only have one sack remaining, which will be used for other projects in the near future… 🙂

I planted the tomato plants in deeper than usual, as they will root from their stem and produce stronger plants. As you can see from the photo below, their lower leaves had started to turn yellow, signaling they really needed potting on and had depleted the nutrients in their pots. I have never bothered using tomato plant feed and with putting them into nutrient rich soil in the grow bags, I don’t intend on fertilising them unless I really have to. I have grown tomatoes successfully for years without using any supplementary feed:

I bought some large canes to grow the tomatoes up and tied them together to create a sturdier structure. The wall that they are sitting against is South facing, so it should release warmth throughout the evening and night.

Last year, I grew the same variety of cherry tomatoes in pots on this wall and those produced a really good crop. I have learnt my lesson however, because last year the pots kept falling over once the tomatoes grew to a large size. I had to improvise by stabilising the pots by mounding old paving slabs around them:

So this is why I have elected for very large grow bags this year. I doubt these will topple over!

I do expect that the crop I get from the tomatoes this year may be less than previous years, due to the temperamental weather this year. If I grew them in the greenhouse, I would probably get a much better crop, but I would lose most, if not all the growing space in the greenhouse for growing other plants.

Last year, when I grew them outside, I got a really good crop throughout Summer from the tomatoes:

I have increased the amount of tomato plants I am growing this year, so I may still be able to get a good crop from all of these plants combined, even if they don’t produce as much fruit per plant. Some of them are already starting to flower.

In the future, I may look into some sort of mini greenhouse specifically for growing tomatoes in, (especially if our weather continues to become less reliable due to climate change), but for this year it will just be an experiment!

I hope you enjoyed seeing what I’ve been getting up to. It’s sunny again this weekend, so it’s time for me to get off the computer and back out in the garden 🙂