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igenlodeThe towel-tomatoes have started turning colour -- not bad for outdoor-sown plants that didn't even come up until May!
And so has the odd 'extra' mini-tomato-plant , which tends to confirm that it is, in fact, one of the towel-tomatoes, impossible as this would seem from a practical point of view. The two kinds definitely do look different: the towel-tomatoes are paler green, almost a translucent colour, and are less round, and the magazine-tomatoes have a darker green stain across the top of the fruit where the towel-tomatoes are of a uniform hue.
I just had another look at them, and since this morning one of the magazine-tomatoes has gone yellow below its dark-green topping -- so those are clearly about to ripen too, just a few days behind.
The three towel-tomatoes that were transplanted to share a larger plot have done very well. It looks as if they kept on setting fruit throughout the heatwave, hidden underneath their mass of low-growing, crowded foliage, and as a result they now have multiple trusses each where the others have about one and a half. And they are still flowering and, apparently, setting -- although any fruit that starts growing at this point is going to be tiny!
I cut the tops off the magazine-tomatoes, since they were simply putting on far too much growth (and hence kept overbalancing in the wind) for very little benefit, the top trusses having set about one fruit each. It's probably just as well that those tall plants didn't set nearly so much fruit as they ought to have done, since most of the fruit-bearing stems are bent in half already, and it would have been very hard to support a full truss, even with knitting wool and sticks. The magazine-tomatoes do have sticks, but they are smaller, bushier, and helping to support one another, as well as being propped up by the neighbouring plants.
All the chillies are now setting, even the pathetic little one that ended up being dwarfed in its own pot by a shoo-fly flower (and now has a couple of pathetic little fruits on it). I really cannot remember whether the original chilli that was the source for these seeds was green or red, and thus don't know whether to wait for the fruits to go red or not! The ones on the single plant that was setting earlier are now three inches long with black streaks, which I seem to remember from past experience is not a sign of rot but of incipient red colour fighting with the green, so I think they may end up changing colour.
[Edit: apparently the chilli was red...]
Oddly enough, the smaller chilli that I moved to the left has produced a number of 'deformed' fruits/flowers, where multiple lobes appear to develop instead of a single long chilli. It seems to be unique to that plant, and to the period immediately following the heatwave and/or the top of the plant, since it has subsequently set some perfectly normal small fruits from a flush of flowers further down the stem. Most of the weird ones went yellow and dropped off, but one of them has survived and developed into a normal-looking fruit with just a couple of extra abortive bumps up at the top end. I don't know if that was a genetic fluke or a response to extreme heat-stress conditions.
The Swan River daisies, which have been sitting around for months growing merrily in a pot of their own (and which I thinned out at the start of August), are now showing signs of putting out flower-heads, so I should have a late flush of flowers at the end of summer. And not yellow or orange, for a change!
My blinds arrived today -- six hundred pounds' worth. (They had to be engineered directly into the frames of the French windows, since there wasn't even room for a portiere rod, given how far the internal handles project from the door.)
Mercifully, there haven't been any more heatwaves this year, although the Mediterranean is apparently still suffering under extreme heat and drought. I'm hoping we've seen the last of it until next year, although that of course means that I shan't be able to test how well, if at all, the blinds function to reduce the greenhouse effect of the sun on those windows! The overall light levels in the room have definitely been reduced by having a slice taken off around the top and inside edges of the French windows, but it doesn't *need* to be brilliantly lit in there (and for the benefit of the books and instruments, it might be better if it isn't...)
And so has the odd 'extra' mini-tomato-plant , which tends to confirm that it is, in fact, one of the towel-tomatoes, impossible as this would seem from a practical point of view. The two kinds definitely do look different: the towel-tomatoes are paler green, almost a translucent colour, and are less round, and the magazine-tomatoes have a darker green stain across the top of the fruit where the towel-tomatoes are of a uniform hue.
I just had another look at them, and since this morning one of the magazine-tomatoes has gone yellow below its dark-green topping -- so those are clearly about to ripen too, just a few days behind.
The three towel-tomatoes that were transplanted to share a larger plot have done very well. It looks as if they kept on setting fruit throughout the heatwave, hidden underneath their mass of low-growing, crowded foliage, and as a result they now have multiple trusses each where the others have about one and a half. And they are still flowering and, apparently, setting -- although any fruit that starts growing at this point is going to be tiny!
I cut the tops off the magazine-tomatoes, since they were simply putting on far too much growth (and hence kept overbalancing in the wind) for very little benefit, the top trusses having set about one fruit each. It's probably just as well that those tall plants didn't set nearly so much fruit as they ought to have done, since most of the fruit-bearing stems are bent in half already, and it would have been very hard to support a full truss, even with knitting wool and sticks. The magazine-tomatoes do have sticks, but they are smaller, bushier, and helping to support one another, as well as being propped up by the neighbouring plants.
All the chillies are now setting, even the pathetic little one that ended up being dwarfed in its own pot by a shoo-fly flower (and now has a couple of pathetic little fruits on it). I really cannot remember whether the original chilli that was the source for these seeds was green or red, and thus don't know whether to wait for the fruits to go red or not! The ones on the single plant that was setting earlier are now three inches long with black streaks, which I seem to remember from past experience is not a sign of rot but of incipient red colour fighting with the green, so I think they may end up changing colour.
[Edit: apparently the chilli was red...]
Oddly enough, the smaller chilli that I moved to the left has produced a number of 'deformed' fruits/flowers, where multiple lobes appear to develop instead of a single long chilli. It seems to be unique to that plant, and to the period immediately following the heatwave and/or the top of the plant, since it has subsequently set some perfectly normal small fruits from a flush of flowers further down the stem. Most of the weird ones went yellow and dropped off, but one of them has survived and developed into a normal-looking fruit with just a couple of extra abortive bumps up at the top end. I don't know if that was a genetic fluke or a response to extreme heat-stress conditions.
The Swan River daisies, which have been sitting around for months growing merrily in a pot of their own (and which I thinned out at the start of August), are now showing signs of putting out flower-heads, so I should have a late flush of flowers at the end of summer. And not yellow or orange, for a change!
My blinds arrived today -- six hundred pounds' worth. (They had to be engineered directly into the frames of the French windows, since there wasn't even room for a portiere rod, given how far the internal handles project from the door.)
Mercifully, there haven't been any more heatwaves this year, although the Mediterranean is apparently still suffering under extreme heat and drought. I'm hoping we've seen the last of it until next year, although that of course means that I shan't be able to test how well, if at all, the blinds function to reduce the greenhouse effect of the sun on those windows! The overall light levels in the room have definitely been reduced by having a slice taken off around the top and inside edges of the French windows, but it doesn't *need* to be brilliantly lit in there (and for the benefit of the books and instruments, it might be better if it isn't...)
