Category Archives: harvest

Tomato Harvest and Seed Saving

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I’m having a sad tomato harvest this year but I’ve read on forums that other people are having problems with their tomatoes too this year. I believe it was potato blight that got to my tomatoes this year since it was about the same time the potato tops started dying. I have been throwing away tomatoes for several weeks now, and once again, another bucket:

I did manage to save some of the fruits for seed saving. 9 fruits from Black Plum tomato plants and 2 from Cherry tomato plants:

I finally gave up on the rest of the fruits – the harvest is a mix of green and red tomatoes. At least we’ll be able to pickle the green ones:

I came across a tomato for seed saving with this special pattern:

I think I’ll name it Black Plum 120, as in 120 degrees, or maybe Peace. I just need to grow the missing vertical bar in the bottom of the peace symbol ;-) I’m excited to see what the offspring from this particular fruit will look like.

Saving Coriander Seeds

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Having fresh herbs just outside your kitchen door is great and this year we had 8 different herbs growing in two large metal tubs. One of them was coriander and it grew like crazy, suffocated the other three herbs in the tub and threw itself out over the edge of the tube and down on the terrace:

I realized that fresh coriander taste and smell very different from the dry powder you buy in the supermarket. I really don’t like the taste or smell of it – I think it’s synthetic in some way. I’ve decided to collect the seeds instead hoping the taste is better:

The seeds need to dry before grinding so I cut down the entire plant and hung it upside down next to the spinach plants:

Hopefully the seeds of both the coriander and the spinach plants will be ready soon. I need the coriander spice for my falafels ;-)

Rescuing My Tomato Plants

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When I find these new shoots on my tomato plants I normally pinch them off to force the plant to focus its energy on the developing fruits instead of foliage, but now that all of my plants are affected by blight I suddenly find myself welcoming these new shoots as they provide much needed foliage since the old has been damaged or wilted away:

Luckily it seems that the leaves affected with blight just dries up and breaks off and don’t cause damage to the main stem of the tomato plant:

I removed the affected foliage and tomatoes and the plants are beginning to look healthy again:

Time will tell if they’ll survive long enough to produce mature tomatoes. As you can see in the picture above there are not many leaves left to do the work.

… which is exactly the problem with my broccoli and cauliflowers too – them caterpillars hungry!:

What I should have done was to grow these plants in a tunnel so that the mother of these caterpillars couldn’t have laid her eggs on the plants when they were small.

Oh well – I’m actually proud that the plants grew this big. Besides the damage done by caterpillars the plants look really healthy. Next year I’ll build a tunnel. And oh – we actually did harvest one broccoli, a real nice one too.