Thursday 12 October 2017

Tomatoes We Grow

Last year Darren came across a punnet of budget friendly tomato plants.   We had an amazing success with them so I thought I'd share the information with others.

They are available at Bunnings Hardware stores for $2.97 per punnet.
There are approximately 6 plus seedling per punnet.
They are called Tall Staking variety

We found them to grow more upwards than out which makes them suitable for smaller veggie gardens.  They are a medium sized tomato and from our experience last year,  nothing seemed to eat them and there was no signs of disease.

When planting the tomatoes,  we added a few timber stakes around each plant to tie the branches to as they grew. We used old cut up socks as garden ties.  These are free and reduce damage to the branches.

Unfortunately Darren didn't keep the information label from last year.  So I went into Bunnings with the words " tall staking " in my mind hoping they'd be available this year.  I found quite a few punnets of them but no variety listed on the label.

 I had a staff member ring the suppler to find out the variety.  They then rang the grower who said they are the Gross Lisse tomato.  We've grown Gross Lisse tomatoes before and found them to be much bigger and prone to bugs / diseases.   The staff member from Bunnings seems to think the parent plant from the ones I bought have better growing characteristics.  I'll go with that.

From the 7 plants we grew last year,  we had enough tomatoes for salad eating,  about 12 jars of relish and 26 x 410 gram tin's worth to freeze.  In other words,  plenty of tomatoes.

The plants did die pretty quickly once the tomatoes started ripening so we kept picking as we needed. Once there seemed no life left in the tomato plants,  Darren picked the rest off whether they'd ripened or not.  The green tomatoes were left outside under the pergola to ripens in the Autumn sun.




7 comments:

  1. HI Wendy,
    Thanks for this information. Has Darren put in this years batch yet???
    I'll have a look a Bunnings this weekend
    Thanks

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  2. Sounds good Wendy, thanks for the handy information.
    Andrea.

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  3. Thanks for sharing Wendy, last year my husband planted 20 plants with hopes of me canning the bulk and relish/ making and if course salad. Well we had beautiful healthy looking plants and so much fruit, but then they got fruit fly , nematodes and variety of ills alas all had to be destroyed, and they were Grosse lisse, first and last time, never had such a growing tradgedy. I will definitely pop out to bunnings and get the ones you did and give them a whirl. Thanks so much for all that you share with us all Wendy your a blessing.xx

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    Replies
    1. Gosh, I hope these ones grow well for you. I don't know whether we had a fluke growing season last year or if it was this variety we grew.

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  4. Wendy if anyone is having troubles with fruit fly, the smaller tiny toms seem to be the best to grow. For some reason the fruit fly leave the cherry varieties alone. Also tomatoes grow really well in pots and this helps alleviate any difficulties with soil nematodes.

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  5. I'm growing cherry tomatoes this season, they self-seed everywhere here in the garden and I grow them in pots and my wicking barrels too. Great to pick a handful and throw into a salad. Meg:)

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