This year in my garden I grow peppers and tomatoes

[venta]

Well, this evening I've done a variety of mundane tasks, including cleaning the kitchen[*]. Now, I have to settle down with the interweb in an attempt to find out what is happening to my beloved tomatoes.

I need someone who knows lots about the care and feeding of tomato plants. I know lots about the eating of tomatoes, but seem to have lost my cultivation skills. When I was little, I used to be entrusted with the Terribly Important Job of looking after our next-door neighbour's tomato plants when they (the neighbours, not the plants) went for their summer holiday. Our household was, in general, reponsible for feeding and watering the hanging baskets, rabbits, budgie etc but I was in charge of the tomatoes.

I used to water the tomatoes daily, and shake them. I had to concede the other day when asked that I had no bloody clue what the shaking was for - and still don't, though I imagine it's to encourage pollination. It's like cutting crosses in Brussel sprouts, it's just one of them things that you do[**]. The neighbour's tomatoes always did terribly well under my care, and, despite a few mishaps, the two tomato plants I acquired as babies at a rapper practice earlier this year have been flourishing. I've watered them, shaken them, tied them up nicely when they started to sag and chatted to them mornings and evenings.

Now, look at this:



Could you ask for a healthier looking prospect at this time of year ?

Sadly, something is rotten in the state of Denmark. If you turn the tomatoes over, this is what you see:



A random selection of tomatoes on each plant have hard, dry plaques of wizened brownness on the base. I don't know if it's a parasite, or a plant disease. I don't know whether I should be nipping off the affected fruits as soon as I see them. In short, I don't have a clue.

Any ideas, anyone ?

The prize for useful information will (at this rate) be a jar of green tomato chutney. Unless the others get a move on ripening.

[**] Yeah, yeah, surface area, yadda yadda. Many years ago leathellin, quisalan and I organised a Christmas dinner in our house. Someone challenged Leathellin and I over why we were cutting crosses into the bases of the sprouts we were preparing and we both looked completely blank and answered that our mums did it, so we did it. Only with some thought could we retrofit a scientific explanation.

[*]This sentence only included in case hendybear is reading. See that ? I cleaned the kitchen, I did! With bleach!

Comments

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Bah, at least you have tomatoes... so far most of ours are still flowering happily, with no sign of any fruit on the way. Maybe we haven't been shaking them the right way.

BTW a few Christmases ago I discovered that if you quarter Brusselses you can saute/braise them, maybe tossing in a handful of cranberries and a spot of balsamic vinegar to zuzz them up a bit, and it's much nicer than boiling. So since then, no more cutting crosses for me.

[metame.livejournal.com]

Chopped chestnuts also go very well with them.

Not that I really like sprouts, you understand, but I think it makes them closer to pleasant.

[lanfykins.livejournal.com]

Oh good, I was beginning to think I had the only flowering tomatoes in the country...

Mine started late, and in Basingstoke, and then sat around being ignored and almost dying for a week or two in Oxford before I actually put them into proper pots and started watering them. They have repaid this treatment with what is, in the circumstances, overwhelming gratitude, but I still fundamentally have a few small (but exciting!) pea-sized things and a number of flowers.

I didn't know about the shaking. I shall have to go and shake them now.

[venta.livejournal.com]

I think the shaking is only for before the fruit has set, it won't help the existing pea-sized fruits grow...

[sea-of-flame.livejournal.com]

Yup, my parents have raved to me about stir fried sprouts, which I imagine involves chopping them up in a similar fashion.

Sprouts are a ritual Christmas foodstuff, that I can happily ignore for the rest of the year ;)