(gentle calming music) - This is about growing tomatoes outdoors in a coolish, temperate climate. So I'm in the southern UK
where our summers are not hot. We average in summer afternoons, not much more than 21, 22 degrees. 22 degrees, that's low seventies, would already be a very
pleasant, warm day. I'll give you an idea today is,
well, we're just nudging 21. This is the middle of May
and it's about the time, normally we plant things
like tomatoes outside 'cause they're killed by frost, so you wait until your
last frost date has passed. Anytime from middle of May,
for much of the UK I know in parts of Scotland
it could be early June, so you have to pay attention
to those microclimate details. And then the question
of ground preparation, this is no dig here, we're
actually in my small garden at Homeacres, and no dig
makes it really simple for succession, so for
example this morning there was purple sprouting broccoli here that I've been picking
over the last five weeks. And I took a final harvest, the spears are getting quite thin, the new shoots are getting small, so it's not worth leaving
in the ground much longer and I'll want the ground for my tomatoes. So I twisted them out, and that way the ground's not been disturbed too much. I actually did walk on
it a bit, you can do this with no dig beds, just if
you've disturbed the ground from pulling something out,
even though I was twisting more than pulling, it caused a bit of more ground disturbance than I'd like, so I want to push this all back down, keep it all together, firm, not compact. Then occasionally I'll use the rake, I'll just look at it is pretty optional, but if anything, just
to get it a bit level and doing this, sometimes
you get a feeling of where the soil might be dry. And before the filming,
earlier this morning I did water here 'cause
where there's been plants like broccoli in a dry
spring such as we've had, they pull a lot of
moisture out and it's good to give some water before you
even do your new planting, it's kind of easier, you
can just do a general water and you don't need to worry
about nutrients running away with no dig again, that doesn't happen, it's all the compost and everything is holding nutrients in
water in soluble form. So there we have our bit of ground. I'm actually going to
give it a bit more water 'cause before I put the compost on even I'm going to put some new compost on, you see how the water's
soaking in well as well, that's characteristic of no dig soil, you normally get very good drainage, you know, from not disturbing it. And then you might have noticed there's two tomato plants there already, which I'd popped in as
plug plants just to see two and a half weeks ago
they were under the broccoli, I forgot about them. They survived and they might
grow to be nice tomatoes. They're a variety called Dorinia, which is bred as an outdoor tomato, so that means that it will grow or should grow in cooler weather. So this is homemade compost, which I've taken from a heap
that we made last autumn, turned once around in November
actually, quite a while ago. And I've pulled out the
bigger bits of wood, but I don't mind little
bits, I've not sieved it, this compost has not
been sifted or anything, this is just how it's come out the heap but I've broken down any
lumps or bigger lumps, and I'm looking to put on, around two and a half centimetres an inch. Very hard thing to quantify that. And how do you actually measure compost, and do you wait until it,
once it's been rained on for example, it settles down. This is quite dry and fluffy
so it's standing up a bit. But this for me is getting close to, ya, well, I'm going to put the
rest on since I'm here, because it won't hurt the
tomatoes that's for sure to have a little bit extra. And even the sort of thing you can do is you can under plant tomatoes
with spinach in August. We'll have a look at that nearer the time. So there we are. One other thing going on here is over winter surviving snapdragons,
may or may not survive. I don't mind if they do or they don't. I hope they do, 'cause I like them. But it's not the end of
the world if they don't. Again, no dig gives you these options because you haven't got
to dig over your ground. So you know if there's a few
plants there you're happy to keep, then they can stay, right. So that's Dorinia, the choice of variety, such a wealth of choices, aren't there? And these two I thought
might be interesting. This one's actually called, wait a minute, this is one, Richard's Egg Yolk Cherry. Richard's the son, I think
it is, of one of my followers and so his mother sent me this. Well no, it might have
been Richard actually if it's your, apology out to Richard, but it comes from that family, Egg Yolk Cherry, so bright yellow. And then this one, I'll need
to put a link up for this, I can't remember the name of the people but they're in Wiltshire and they run a specialist tomato company and this one is called, Yuko's Persimmon
Cross Lilia's Perfection. And I think it's going to be an ague, and I'm prepared to take that risk. I take a few gambles planting tomatoes 'cause it's often fun to see what happens. This one I'm pretty sure (giggles), we got in the mix with labels as usual, I'm pretty sure that's Sungold. I like Sungold, I recommend Sungold, I hope it is because you'll
see it comes quite early. We're going to revisit
this in a couple of months, see how they do. You'll see the stakes
we've put in as well. Most of these are cordon tomatoes, so they'll grow up to about that high and we'll tie them to a stake,
with a bit of side shooting. This one also was supposed to be Sungold but it doesn't look like it to me. The truss looks a bit bigger, I think it might be a beef tomato. Ah. So there we'll see,
we'll all learn something, and I'll just finish today
by popping in these plants. You'll see that I've
not done anything more than just put the compost on. It's gone on moist ground
so that's a good start. And if it wasn't going to rain,
I would give a general water after planting 'cause I want this compost to kind of soak into the ground a bit and become very accessible
to soil organisms through being moist. Here's an interesting thing. This root ball, is nearly all dry. I'm feeling how light it is. That is fine. When you are watering
plants in pots like this, they don't have to be wet all the time, and actually it can be
better that they're not because that helps to keep
some air around the roots. I'm putting it in pretty deep, that's partly to make watering easier, leave a little hole around the stem which also facilitates that, means the water doesn't run away. And doing these holes
also gives me the chance to see what the soil is like. Again, pretty dry here around the edge. Quite stony too, I dunno
if you can hear that. This small garden is on
the site of a combination of gravel paths and boiler buildings from when this was a nursery
in the 1960s and '70s, so the soil is really good
on top and I've made it good from adding compost, but
underneath it's quite gravelly and even bits of glass and things in it. Really again makes me glad
I'm not digging it over in a general way, just
the odd hole like this, see the bits of gravel
that are coming out there. But sometimes we're
trying to put stakes in, we might have a bit of a job
to put the tomato stakes in because of the dryness
and obviously, sorry, the gravel and stone and rock, and goodness knows what
else is down there. This one I'll keep the label 'cause I've never grown it before and I want to be reminded
what it is and that one too. So we've got a little
bit of certainty there. This is another Dorinia. And one other thing I'm
not going to do here, this by the way, people have
a laugh sometimes (laughs), like I put up a video about
how to plant a no dig potato, and I'm digging a little hole in there. They say, you know,
this doesn't make sense. I can see their point, but with no dig you occasionally you've
got to do a bit of digging, what I'm doing with these holes is being as tidy as
possible, I cut four corners around the square of the
root ball and then it slides in with as little root
disturbance as possible. The roots are then
going to happily travel, they do happily travel,
you can see by the growth that happens, into the firm,
undisturbed soil nearby, and spacing is another issue
because you might have noticed I'm putting these pretty close, spacings that are given
like on seed packets, oh, that one's dry as well,
I'll make a note of that, mental note, if you get a
dry one, give it more water after planting, the
spacings assume, I reckon, that your tomatoes are
going to have a long season to grow and then be able
to explore all the soil and space around them, whereas in the UK, much of the UK anyway, as
we found last summer 2021, the biggest potential
problem is late blight. And last year that happened in August, and so August is when mostly
the fruit are developing and then you get the first ripe tomatoes and then you got late blight. It's like, you can lose a crop, so there's an element of gamble here, it's why I don't do too
many tomatoes outside. But it's always fun and the spacing, because there's that risk of disease and the season is so short,
they don't actually need so much room really because
they haven't got time to fully explore the soil and the space in the way that say courgette might 'cause it's so fast growing,
these are slower growing. I'm going to take them up to let them grow upwards side shooting till
they're about that high, but the key point is
August the 10th you'll see that's when I'm going
to pinch out the tops. And that way, you don't let them grow for too long before the
blight might arrive. Well, we hope it won't,
there's no way of knowing. So I look forward to seeing you back here at some point in the summer. I'm just checking for side
shoots and tying in the plants. It's now the 13th of June, and the weather has been average, so that's okay. Our summer days are not that often warm, we've had temperature no
higher than 23 centigrade, 73 Fahrenheit, and so
that's slow steady growth and there's no worries yet about blight. And the tying in I'm doing
is quite time consuming, at least the way I'm doing it here. So I'm putting a tie at
every 10 to 15 centimetre, four to six inches, as
they grow up the stake. And this one looks like Sungold. I did lose one there, labels right, but I'm going to know
once they start fruiting. And you can can see the
fruit are already developing. And one thing I'm going to do
here with the bottom most truss, I'm going to take off the end of it, you can see how the
tomatoes are quite good up to that point and then
suddenly they're not. - Yeah.
- And if you do that, remove that bit, it gives you these ones more chance of ripening quite quickly while the plant is still growing, 'cause at this time of year now, the tomatoes are doing
everything, they're growing, they're starting to make
fruit, and it won't be long before they also need
to ripen their fruit, so you need to make sure
they're well watered. I'm seeing here that
this ground is quite dry, we haven't watered much,
we've had eight days ago we had 24 millimetres,
nearly an inch of rain, so that was brilliant, and
I haven't really looked at them since then, but
I'm looking at them now and thinking, mm,
they're a little bit dry, they could do with some water. So it's clearly not
vital in bright sunlight, they haven't been wilting or anything, but I'm just keeping them
moist without over watering. That's pretty much my rule
of thumb for everything. Makes life simpler, less watering. And you can see by the side shoot if you haven't done it before, you're looking for
these little new growths out of the side of the plant where the leaf joins the main stem. And here's another
truss, this one actually, I could have taken one off before now, but that one's yeah,
there's one I'll take off, that little one, is just
struggling to make it but the rest of these look pretty good. And that's about it for now. It's just looking after
them, side shooting, tying them in as in when they need it, keeping them watered, I'm not feeding, I don't feed my tomatoes
but they're on quite a wide spacing you can
see here, so that helps. I'll leave that up to you to decide whether you want to feed them or not, you're going to see
here when we come back, you'll see the result of not feeding but with the compost mulch on top, and I'll finally mention
the two at the back are pretty close together. They were put in very on spec when there was still broccoli here and I'm leaving them there quite close because behind them the
peas close to the edge of that bed have died for whatever reason, and that means there's
more space behind them they can root into and even grow into. One more job that's worth doing is removing the lower leaves. As a rule of thumb I take off leaves up to the bottom most truss. So this one, they often snap off, the fact when they snap off is a sign that they're kind of ready to go. So this is a leaf you kind
of know it's not doing much for the plant anymore,
it's losing or lost colour, it's going a bit spotty. If you see problems like
spots on your lower leaves, don't worry too much, it's probably not anything to worry about. The action all happens, the important bit is at the top of the plant,
80% of the photosynthesis is happening at that top end. So these lower leaves are
not doing much anymore. And it means that there's less leaf area to take water from the soil,
there's probably less chance of blight, you know there's
less bit of plant doing anything and even a leaf like
that, I could take off, I'll leave it for now,
but that won't be long, you can see the end of that leaf is starting to go a bit spotty. So I'll be going through
here and doing a bit of de-leafing, and we'll come back here in about a month I reckon, when I'm hoping there'll be a few ripe
fruit, the first ones and we'll have a weather report as well 'cause that's the key thing for growing outdoor tomatoes
in a temperate climate. It's five weeks since we were here. You can see there's a bit that's happened. I'm going to work my way through. We've already harvested some
of these, they're beautiful. We got in a muddle over varieties, I grow so many, and the
labels got switched around, these are either Egg Yolk or Persimmon. I favour the latter 'cause
they tasted it like Persimmon. You see I'm cutting whole trusses, you can harvest tomatoes when
they're just turning colour, it's called breaking stage, tomatoes ripen from the inside out. So you've got, that's riper than it looks and it finishes ripening
like in your house, and it takes the strain off the plant. And you can see how on this one, these leaves are not looking brilliant. If this happens to you, don't worry. The reason for it is I'm pretty sure, that I let too many fruits
like all of those develop on a very small plant really,
and it put a big strain on the plant and it kind
of went through a phase of struggling and now it's
looking okay again actually. And what I would do, even now is, thin this truss, even take two out, because this plant is not
quite a hundred percent I need to water it more. I have been watering actually
that feels quite moist. But we've had a lot of hot weather, and as a result, look at this beautiful, that whole truss I'm going to
leave, I'm going to cut off, so it's de-leafing, still side shooting, there's a side shoot I missed (laughs), I just noticed now there's
another one I missed, they shoot out so fast
at this time of year. Don't worry if you missed one, but tomatoes are kind of very ongoing, there's always more tidying, de-leafing. This is the Sungold, you
can see we've already taken a whole truss. I'll cut off the empty
truss when it's finished. Pick those fruits that are ripe, Sungold's beautiful, sweet little fruit, you can see very different
to those, early as well. I mean this one's done
well for being so early. The other thing I'm doing
at this time of year is taking out the tops. That might look like vandalism,
it feels it a bit actually. But for one thing here
it can be quite windy as we go into autumn,
I don't want the plants to be too tall or risk blowing over. Secondly, when you got trusses like this towards the end of
July, that's giving time in our climate not normally very hot, for the all those fruits
to both grow and to ripen. So there's less chance of
lots of unused green fruit. I know you can use green
tomatoes, but I want ripe ones, and there's always that
overhanging risk of blight, so I'm just going through all of them now I'll take the tip above, so just leaving that little truss there. And some of these at the
back are taller varieties. So actually I'm going
to take it down a bit, also because they haven't
actually ripened yet. I would've done this even
a couple of days ago, I was waiting for the video to do this, but I want to give you the idea. And don't be afraid of
doing this because, yeah, you're stopping the plant basically, it can't grow anymore that way, but what it can do is
now put all of its energy into swelling the fruits,
and the other thing, brief thing to mention at this point is the trusses and how big they are, Sungold for example,
here's a nice example, that's all one truss. And if I let every single
fruit develop on that, it might take a very long time for those last ones to ripen. I quite often take out
just that little tip because that way there's more energy goes into the ones closer to the plant and you get bigger, nicer fruit and they ripen more quickly. So there's a range of options, mid-July and then we'll come back towards the end of August probably and
hopefully there'll be no blight but where we're heading to now, August, that's where it gets risky,
the weather gets more humid and it stays warm, so we'll see. (water spraying) It's now mid August and look at this. They've grown really well,
but I've been very lucky with the weather, this year, summer 2022 has been pretty hot recently,
we've just had a week of close to 30 centigrade
temperatures, mid 80's Fahrenheit, which for us is pretty unusual, and also for the last six weeks
it's been pretty dry, hence no blight, no late blight yet. In the last six weeks we've
had just five millimetres of rain, one fifth of an inch. So I've been watering
regularly which you need to do with tomatoes because
they're thirsty plants but I've not been feeding. So this is the result of
just using compost mulch, no feeds or fertilisers. You can see I've been de-leafing. And shortening trusses
particularly on the Sungold because like I've taken an
end off that truss there for example, and that helps
the fruits which remain, which there's still a lot of
fruit, to get to a decent size. And otherwise you risk having some fruits that never really make nice fruit and that takes energy from the plant. So little things like that
can make quite a difference. Being realistic to your
soil and situation, and putting on the water has been helping 'cause I've been doing one
more thing under the plants, which is I'm already thinking
what's going to grow next with these tomatoes, and I've decided to put some coriander
on the end of this bed, which will grow through the autumn, it should survive the winter. And likewise spinach. So this is Medania Spinach,
sown two weeks ago, multi-sown in modules, and it's three days since I put them in the ground. It gives you a clue that
they're actually grown a bit but they go in pretty small,
which is totally fine. And you can see that there's
a tomato root for example, so that spinach there, that
spinach plant won't grow a lot at the moment,
which is totally fine. It doesn't need to, it's just
getting its roots down around and through the tomato
roots, they might even be helping each other, this inter-planting is such a beautiful method,
and then by mid-October I reckon it might be sooner,
when I come to remove the tomato plants I can
just cut at the base, even using a sharp trowel,
sorry plant (laughs), but it'll be finishing by then and that will leave the spinach unaffected and it will, you know, there'll
be a spinach harvest here by late October, very soon
after the tomatoes finish. So these tomatoes have
got, well, how long to go? We don't know for sure, it
depends when late blight arrives, that's the main governing factor. I've already pinched out
the tops of the plants, and that means they can't
make any more new fruit now, I've shortened the trusses,
the main ongoing job is removing any side shoot that you see, that's important 'cause otherwise
the plants wasting energy trying to grow new stems and
they will keep doing that once you've pinched out the tops, they keep making side shoots, and just make sure they're well supported. So I've put in a a
couple of top bars there where the plants were growing up. Even after you've pitched out the top, they do carry on growing upwards, and then there was fruit
developing at the top of the plant can be so heavy that it
pulls the plant over. And to my horror, about three days ago one of those plants had
snapped almost in the middle and it looked snapped. Anyway, I managed to lift
it up still connected, and put the horizontal bar in
across two of the verticals and rested the plant on that, and it's still looking
really healthy actually, it's amazing what plants can
do in that way, you know, it's just a little connection is enough. So now I'm going to do a big
pick, this is how much fruit has grown in six days since the last pick. And we'll see what we get. There's Sungold and Uluru Yellow, and Dorinia is the red one. (tomatoes snapping off) Now 26 days later. And I'm very pleased with the progress we've had quite a lot of
warm weather, in our terms, warmer than usual, night temperatures above 10 centigrade, 50 Fahrenheit and daytime temperatures 20
centigrade 70's Fahrenheit. I've been watering a little
'cause it's been very dry but not over watering,
I don't want the plants to put on a lot of fleshy growth as they come towards
the end of their life. So keep the watering as little as possible in that stage of your tomatoes. I have needed to water
though to keep the spinach and coriander alive and that has worked because also then we
had quite a bit of rain from 10 days ago to three days ago, nearly two inches, 46 millimetres. So I noticed then how much
the spinach suddenly grew. If you can often, if you
keep seedlings just alive, you know, then as soon as it rains a bit they'll really grow like
a rocket. Fantastic. So what remains to do now is
I've been also side shooting, keeping the plants tidy,
and oh, I must mention the leaf roll, that's on
this variety here, Dorinia, and you'll notice there's
very little leaf roll still a bit, but nothing to
worry about really on Sungold, but I'm not worrying
about that either actually 'cause I'm still getting lovely fruit and it's, you know, it's not
having a significant effect. I think often I get questions
a lot about, you know, imperfections in tomato plants, and people are worried 'cause
they don't look perfect, and that's okay (laughs), and you know, as long as the leaves are generally green, generally, even you can
have spots and things that's still all right,
and as long as the fruits are looking nice, yeah, you're okay. One thing this variety does, Sungold, is it splits and that's
a varietal trait as well. So they're not all doing it here, but the Sungold is prone to that, so all that is a result
of, is it being quite dry and then suddenly it's rained and the fruits have taken on so much water that the skin is split
because Sungold skin is quite tender and thin, which means it makes it nice to eat. So there's many ways
looking at that one as well, I like the split ones,
it's often the split ones that are the sweetest. And Blossom End Rot, I must mention too, 'cause that can be the result
of really dry conditions. It's often said that it's not
enough calcium in the soil, and that's kind of true,
it's not enough calcium in the plant though,
and that's mainly from there not being enough water to get the calcium up to the fruit. So if you are suffering Blossom End Rot, which is a black, very ugly black patch, that can be quite big at the
bottom of a tomato fruit, you can still eat the top half by the way, but the black patch means you
need to water more, basically. So you tend to see it in heatwaves, sudden hot, dry weather and then you need to pile on the water, I mean
tomatoes are thirsty plants, but at the stage we're at now where there isn't any new growth needed, and where I've been
removing a lot of leaves so there isn't a lot of
leaf on some of these now they don't need anything
like so much water, and in fact, if it
hadn't rained 10 days ago and recently, I would've carried on with my minimal watering regime and these fruits would
probably be even the riper, so don't overdo the
watering as the plants come to the end of their lives. There's also a bit of unhealthy leaf here on this yellow one. I haven't said a lot about that 'cause I've been a bit unclear
about exactly what it is. I was given the seeds by a
company called Tomato Revolution, really great pioneering people who are developing new varieties, and that's one that they call an F2, which means it's an F1 hybrid
crossed with something else or grown out, actually
I think more strictly it's grown out from the
seed of an F1 hybrid plant. You get a bit of a mix, and
in fact one of the breeders was here last week and he was
very interested to see this, and I'll put the name on the screen, as I can't remember it actually
off the top of my head, it's quite long. The fruit are nice,
but look at the leaves, they don't look brilliant,
but again, I'm not too worried 'cause the fruit tastes nice
and that's the main thing. I'm actually keeping a few seeds from this to see what it does. I won't keep seeds from the
Sungold 'cause that's a hybrid. I am keeping seeds of this one, Dorinia, because it tolerates cold climates, you can see how well it's done here, even though we've had a warm summer, I think it would've done well last year. So the picking at this stage
is just the same as usual with one exception,
that I'm going to pick, oh, that one didn't come off, less ripe. So a fruit like that, it's
not red, but it's breaking, it's called, it's going red,
it's showing that tendency. If you compare that to a bright green one, like over there, we
can show you on screen, that is half ripe, if not more. And that will finish
ripening inside no problem. What it means is that I
can now clear the plant, 'cause I want to show you that, how do you clear a tomato plant when you've got other
plants growing underneath like we have here? And I'm first cutting the strings holding this onto the staking. So now this plant is
loose and what I can do is cut around the roots. You could do this with a trowel. It's just a question of getting this out with minimal disturbance
of the plant roots, sorry, of the spinach roots, I should say. Leaving most of the tomato
plants in the ground. And this does work well for no dig. So that's how much I'm removing. And most of the tomato roots
are still in the ground. And then when I take
this to the compost heap, I'm going to slice it
into four to six inch, 10, 15 centimetre lengths,
and that will decompose more quickly, in fact, with
a knife you can slice it on a diagonal, that's easier
than cutting across them, that exposes more surface
area to the bacteria. And basically now we're left with the lovely scenario of the next planting, the spinach, coriander growing. We've had a lovely tomato harvest. Some of these plants,
the Sungold I might leave for another week, but all the
Dorinia I'm going to take out, and there we are. (gentle calming music)
