Episode #10: Beating the Blight
Tomatoes, tomatoes, pickles, tomatoes, chutney, tomatoes. Rinse and repeat.
Weekend 12-13 October saw the arrival of The Dreaded Blight on a next door plot and a surprise appearance by the Northern Lights over the allotments during the week. There were a LOT of tomatoes to deal with along the way.
(There are a lot of photos here too, and they might not all fit on your email. Hitting the View Entire Message button at the end should sort this out, as will the app or online versions of Substack.)
This week’s Plot Shot
Real plant beauty this week, thanks to the Swiss chard which has been growing quietly all summer between the bully tomato plants. This variety is ‘Candystripe’ chard from the folk at Real Seeds, all glossy green leaves and mainly pink-on-white stems but with a few yellow-orange in the mix. Like ‘Peppermint’, but with some citrus zest sprinkled in.
I love growing chard. It gives such a zing when most of the summer colour is going over1. I’d grow chard in flower beds in a garden if I didn’t have an allotment.
Plot work in progress
The arrival of The Dreaded Blight on a neighbouring plot finally forced the issue of us having to clear down all the tomato plants this weekend. I picked all the remaining tomatoes on Saturday, all colours, shapes and sizes. There were a lot of small green bullets. But pulling the tomato plants out did give more space for the chard.
Tomatoes cleared, I bagged up the plants to be taken away for burning. Didn’t photograph that. Nasty businesss. But the clearing down meant that there’s now space for brassica seedlings to overwinter.
I was in a rush to get the seedlings in (‘Cavolo Nero’, probably), and couldn’t face the faff of sorting out nets to go over the hoops, so each one has its own deluxe upcycled bottle greenhouse until they outgrow them.
Harvesting now
Harvesting *all* the remaining tomatoes meant that the last variety I was waiting to ripen, ‘Black Moon’ didn’t quite make it. Here are the best ones - the Magnificent Seven, gorgeous black, reddening towards the base. All the lycopene.
The less ripe ‘Black Moon’ were still pretty, purple-to-black tops, green bottoms. Pale green stars on their tops. We’ll grow these again next year, hopefully with a better summer to ripen them earlier.
Making and eating
Given the arrival of The Dreaded Blight on the site, I picked all our remaining tomatoes on Saturday, stripping the plants of everything regardless of ripeness.
I kept the ‘Black Moon’ apart from the rest, and decided to pickle them as a crop, allspice, yellow mustard seeds, black pepper and a few coriander seeds, toasted before adding to hot apple cider vinegar.
Here’s the finished pickle, tomatoes already colouring the vinegar in the jar2.
While I pickled, husband Clive chopped. Chopping our remaining apples, all the remaining tomatoes and a few added onions for chutney should probably be worthy of a medal in the Olympics. Marathon chopping.
Roughly nine hours later (three spent chopping, six stirring to stop it catching and burning) we had two litres of organic (mainly green) tomato chutney. Two litres is a *lot* of chutney, and inevitably at the end of the preserving season, we’re completely out of sensibly-sized small jars. Two litre-sized Kilner jars were the only option, which is probably bonkers3.
I added the preserves to the plot tally for the week, rather than the weight of the fruit and veg4.
E17 Local Hero
The ‘Stow had a flickering, fleeting visitor this last week, in the form of of the Northern Lights, Aurora Borealis. They started quite slowly, just a hint of colour hanging above the plots at about 19:30 on Wednesday evening.
Two hours later, by 21:30, the light show was in full swing. Smart phone cameras pick up the colours much better than the human eye, but they were really clear. Amazing.
I know people all over the UK saw them, but for the colours to be so visible on a clear night in London, where light pollution and clouds usually spoil the show, felt special.
Community of Practice
This last week has been about the practice of preparing plots for winter. Tender plants which are not frost hardy are being shuffled into greenhouses and other protected spaces. (There’s a plot-neighbour’s citrus tree, imported from Seville, which spends its winters wrapped in fleece in a shed, presumably sulking for the Spanish sun.)
Barrows of bark chip are being dug into beds as mulch and to improve the drainage under plants. I learnt the hard way last spring that tulips do not like wet feet, and we lost lots from the ends of the rotation beds over the wet winter.
Again learning from last year’s failures, I’ve taken all our chilli plants home from the greenhouse to keep them warm. We tried to over-winter our chillis last year but I was a week too late getting them indoors, and they’d already been subjected to a cold snap by the time they got to our kitchen, then struggled, gradually yellowing and dropping their leaves over the dark months. I’m more hopeful that this year’s batch will make it through to spring, as they have fresh compost and a snazzy red and blue disco grow light in their winter digs.
Our surprise of the week is a ‘Bartlett’s Bonnet’ chilli plant which has been hiding amongst the greenhouse dahlias all summer. Grown from seed in early 2023, it was our only plant to survive the winter last year, so the force is strong with this one. I wasn’t expecting the plant to over a meter long. I say long, as the plant was growing sideways through other plants across the greenhouse staging, rather than up.
Story short, we are now sharing our kitchen with an unruly 1.2m high chilli plant, nicknamed Barty, for the winter. He’s got a good spot picked out on the copper cocktail trolley with a view of the garden and a single bright red chilli to show for his efforts this summer.
Until next week, by which time Barty will probably be mixing cocktails and inviting mates round for Martinis.
Ang
Large handful of chard stems, 200g, currently £2.90 per 100g at Abel & Cole, £5.80.
One litre of organic pickled tomatoes, Bodrum brand currently £7.99/670g in the local Turkish shop, £11.93.
Two litres organic green tomato chutney, Tracklements brand currently £3.90/270g at Ocado, £28.40.
Total for this week, Episode #10, £46.13, total to date since Episode #5, £164.26. Six weeks’ produce, based on current supermarket or local farmers’ market prices.
You were lucky not getting blight until now. I had blight on my outdoor tomatoes in the Midlands in September. Already been made into homemade tomato ketchup. Our greenhouse tomatoes are still going but I’ve kept the door shut since the outdoor tomatoes got the blight. They are taking a long time to ripen on the plant now with the low light levels.