Property News · August 14, 2016

Gardens: ripen your tomatoes


How to get your crop up to speedI freely confess to being an obsessive tomato grower, experimenting with up to 60 varieties every year in my tiny Croydon plot. Sadly, my anorak-level fixation with the fruit makes much of July and August a long and frustrating wait for them to ripen. Without a greenhouse, my outdoor tomatoes often only just have time to ripen before being clobbered by autumn, not to mention the ever-present threat of late blight. If this sounds familiar to you, fortunately there are several evidence-based techniques anyone can use to speed the ripening of your little flavour bombs, even this late in the year.Aside from the coddled conditions of a greenhouse, which cheat the seasons forward, the single most effective way to get earlier crops is to pick a variety whose genetics trigger it into fruiting early. There are many, such as ‘Early Girl’ and ‘Sub Arctic Plenty’, but the very earliest is a surprising one: ‘Sungold’. This beautiful orange cherry tomato famed for its sweetness consistently ripens weeks before any other for me – yet no one else seems to mention this. Definitely my choice for the impatient. Continue reading…

Source : theguardian.com
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