Mellow fruitfulness
26 August 2022 11:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
We had the first real 'autumn' morning today, misty with a heavy dew. (Or perhaps that is just the side-effect of water in the atmosphere after so long a dry spell!)
One of my smaller towel-tomatoes, having finished fruiting, has decided to throw up a couple of vigorous new stems and have another go at flowering (the others, I think, are starting to die back while setting their final fruit). The rescued Roma tomato is, in fact, responding to kind treatment and opening a few tentative side-shoots and some possible flowers, although it's pretty late for that -- it should have been potted on long ago, poor little thing! The heritage cherry tomatoes are still growing upwards, putting out fresh flowers, and not setting very well; apparently the difference between 'determinate' and 'indeterminate' tomatoes is precisely that the former ripen a single crop of fruit, while the latter continue to grow and fruit sporadically to a more or less indefinite size.
I have barbered the thyme, which is now displaying some healthy green shoots amongst a mass of brown dead wood -- rather like the grass in the park :-p
The catch-up chillies now have really big fruit on (even bigger than last year, I think). They are 3½–4 inches long, as versus the Demon Red chillies, which are an inch to an inch and a half. (No signs of ripening on even the earliest of those yet.) And even the two smallest of the catch-up chillies, which were stuffed into a single pot together and which I really ought to have uprooted in order to re-use the pot at the stage when the larger single plants had belated fruit on them and the runts hadn't got so much as a bud, are now coming into flower, although to be honest that is pretty much a waste of resources ;-p
Now that I have managed to root a total of four strawberry runners in a variety of neigbouring pots, I have hardened my heart and pulled up the large and still apparently healthy parent plant, on the grounds that it is apparently superannuated after failing to flower :-(
One of my smaller towel-tomatoes, having finished fruiting, has decided to throw up a couple of vigorous new stems and have another go at flowering (the others, I think, are starting to die back while setting their final fruit). The rescued Roma tomato is, in fact, responding to kind treatment and opening a few tentative side-shoots and some possible flowers, although it's pretty late for that -- it should have been potted on long ago, poor little thing! The heritage cherry tomatoes are still growing upwards, putting out fresh flowers, and not setting very well; apparently the difference between 'determinate' and 'indeterminate' tomatoes is precisely that the former ripen a single crop of fruit, while the latter continue to grow and fruit sporadically to a more or less indefinite size.
I have barbered the thyme, which is now displaying some healthy green shoots amongst a mass of brown dead wood -- rather like the grass in the park :-p
The catch-up chillies now have really big fruit on (even bigger than last year, I think). They are 3½–4 inches long, as versus the Demon Red chillies, which are an inch to an inch and a half. (No signs of ripening on even the earliest of those yet.) And even the two smallest of the catch-up chillies, which were stuffed into a single pot together and which I really ought to have uprooted in order to re-use the pot at the stage when the larger single plants had belated fruit on them and the runts hadn't got so much as a bud, are now coming into flower, although to be honest that is pretty much a waste of resources ;-p
Now that I have managed to root a total of four strawberry runners in a variety of neigbouring pots, I have hardened my heart and pulled up the large and still apparently healthy parent plant, on the grounds that it is apparently superannuated after failing to flower :-(