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14/09/2006 19:31 - Tasty tomatoes!
The Totally Tomato Show went off with a bang with over 4,500 people coming to enjoy the glorious weather and a cornucopia of tasty tomatoes. This year, we increased the opportunities for people to really interact with the tomatoes and, by golly, they took full advantage of it. Thanks to the Tomato Growers Association, we had a virtual conveyor belt for people to taste from, ranging from the latest commercial varieties to some pretty obscure heirloom ones. This, and the 'Doctor Tomato' demonstrations of growing and cultivation, proved to be the two most popular features, but the food stalls and bar came a close third! Since then, I have been busy finalising budgets and welcoming two groups of our peers to West Dean. We welcomed 40 head gardeners, gardeners and garden advisors from English Heritage, and the garden team from Hampton Court. Such events are always rewarding, if slightly nerve racking, with the opportunity to strut your stuff and talk to your peers - and hopefully pick their brains at the same time. Now we are off on holiday to Italy for three weeks, a much anticipated break so it's 'All quiet on the West Dean front' for now.
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06/09/2006 20:10 - Totally Tomato 2
Historically, most of the tomatoes have been grown under glass, as in the last picture. This has the obvious advantage of giving you total cotrol over the plant environment, and more or less guarantees a reasonable result. Growing outside is a bit more risky, but this year we have bitten the bullet and carried out a fairly large trial of 50 different varieties under the open sky. Having said that, we have positioned them in a very favourable spot in the border at the base of the south-facing kitchen garden wall, where they receive maximum protection, sunlight and thus the highest outdoor temperatures. This seems to have paid off because they are all looking pretty healthy and are bearing large crops. Fingers crossed for the weekend!
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06/09/2006 20:00 - Totally Tomato 1
One of our other signature crops are tomatoes. Each year we grow somewhere between 150 - 200 different varieties, ranging from jewel-like cherry tomatoes to football-like beefsteaks, and everything in between. As with the chillies, these succulent taste bombs have their own dedicated show, the Totally Tomato Show, which is coming up this weekend, (9/10 September) and for we which we are frantically preparing. The weather looks set to be fair and we are hoping to attract another 6 000-plus tomato nuts to join in the fun. If you've never been, do come and have a look. 'Doctor Tomato' will be giving out diagnoses and advice on how to improve your crop, and there will be tastings to titilate the tastebuds, along with lots of tomato culinary tips and stalls for tomato-based retail therapy. Of course, as always, at the heart of the show are the plants themselves, and they are looking great!
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05/09/2006 19:01 - I could give a fig 3
And just to show you I'm not lying, here is some evidence. And as with all fruit, once you've produced it, don't ruin it by picking it too early. It's said that a fig is ready to eat when it resembles an impoverished widow with a brown cloak that is torn and gaping, that is, when it has a tear of nectar in its eye at the end of the fruit, and splits in the fruit's skin. If you can wait until the widow appears, then cup her gently in your habnd as you remove her from her perch and you are in for a deeply sensuous gastronomic experience. Vive la figue!
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05/09/2006 19:01 - I could give a fig 2
'How to prune a fig' is one of our most frequently-asked questions, at which point I normally run screaming into a darkened potting shed! It's not that it's hugely complicated, but somehow whenever I try and explain it, I always end up confusing both myself and my audience. Perhaps the most important point to grasp is that next year's figs overwinter as tiny, pea-sized embryonic fruits on the tips of the current season's growth. Thus, to keep your fan-trained fig in manageable proportions, and also bearing a crop next summer, the trick is to cut the new current season's growth back to a bud or two by mid-June at the latest. From these cuts, it will produce some nice, relatively-short new growth that will carry next year's embryonic figs at its tip. Easy huh? Or should I run screaming into cyber space?!
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05/09/2006 18:50 - I could give a fig 1
Part of the West Dean brief is to grow as an extensive range as possible of fruit as would have been associated with a 19th century walled kitchen garden. As well as growing a lot of fruit under glass in dedicated glasshouses (principally grapes, peaches, nectarines and figs), we also grow a lot on the interior of the exterior walls, if you get my drift. Historically, each wall had particular fruits grown on it, dictated by its aspect: peaches, apricots and nectarines on the warm, south-facing wall; morello cherries and some more robust plums on the cool north-facing; plums and pears on the warmish west-facing, and plums on the intermediate east-facing. Initially, we followed this and planted peaches, nectarines and apricots on the south-facing wall but, despite regular spraying with Bordeaux, they invariably succumbed to peach leaf curl and ended up looking pretty awful. We persisted for a number of years, but eventually the contrast between the fantastic peaches and nectarines grown under glass and their sickly outdoor cousins was too much, and out they came. Having run the restored walled garden for 12 years now we are, where possible, always looking for ways to maintain the overall standard and 'feel' whilst reducing the inputs, so when the peaches went, we replaced them with figs. Partly because I think they are less time-consuming to manage, partly because they are trouble-free and have a fantastic leaf, and partly because I have a weakness for a sunkissed fig! These are now in their third season and are producing their first light crop. As with all trained fruit, the most important stage is the formative years: get the framework established and the rest is plain sailing.
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04/09/2006 19:20 - Path improvements 2
Having never attempted Tarmacing before, we approached it with a degree of trepidation - not helped by the fact that as soon as we started, the heavens opened and rivulets of water started to stream down the path, creating images of Pompeiian pryroclastic flows as the water steamed and the Tarmac snap, crackled and popped like a vast bowl of Rice Krispies. Tarmac is amazing stuff, solid but semi-liquid and laying it is a bit like filling up baking trays with treacle toffee: the secret is to keep the stuff warm because, once it starts to set, you'll never shift it again. Eventually, we got into the rhythm of it, with one person carting, two people spreading and levelling, and one rolling it to bowling-green smoothness. We shifted 7 x 16-tonne loads in three and a half hot and back-breaking days. Dead heading it isn't, but in the scheme of things, it's a big, long-term contribution to the accessibility of the garden!
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04/09/2006 19:10 - Path improvements 1
Paths are the arteries of the garden. If there isn't a hard path to a destination, then a vast number of garden visitors will never discover that area or feature. As a consequence, we have put a lot of effort over the years into ensuring that the bulk of the garden is serviced by attractive, all-weather routes. This has included metal edging all of them, and a rolling programme of tarmacing followed by tar and chipping so that they look like a gravel path. This provides a durable, attractive, pushchair- and wheelchair-friendly, all-weather surface that should be good for 25 years-plus, given a minimal amount of maintenance. This year we decided to try our hands at being the 'Boys from the Blackstuff' rather than contracting the work out, which offered the distinct attraction of being able to cover nearly twice the area for the same price! As with any job 75% of the task is in the preparation, ensuring the surface is clean, pothole-free, falls correctly, has adequate drainage etc. This took about five days...then came the fun bit!
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04/09/2006 19:01 - Compost corner 3
Finally, the woody material. Historically, a fair amount of our smaller woody material was put through the shredder and the larger material was burnt.The problem with this is that the shredder is brilliant at shredding green waste but less adept at woody waste, with the result that our compost was somewhat lumpy where the half-digested chunks of timber lingered undecomposed. Last year, however, we invested in a large chipper that can happily deal with material up to 15mm diameter, converting it with a mighty roar into bite-sized 15mm nuggets. This is all stacked in a very large bin, allowed to weather for six months and then used as a mulch or mixed throughout the compost to provide a bit of 'body'. This has reduced our bonfire days to half a dozen a year, and provided another long term source of slow release organic matter to feed our voracious, chalky soil. Nature never wastes anything, and we are getting a lot better at emulating her.
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04/09/2006 18:50 - Compost corner 2
After a further six months, the matured pile is sufficiently broken down to use around the garden and so the cycle begins again. Other materials that are treated in slightly different ways are the two large piles of manure that we buy from the farm each year and the large piles of 'hay' that come off the wild flower meadows. These miss the shredding and are both simply stacked and turned monthly, if we are lucky. Given 12 months or so, these two are also ready for use, the manure mainly in the kitchen garden and the composted hay as a mulch for shrubberies.
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04/09/2006 18:20 - Compost corner 1
Integral to any garden is its 'Let's get down and dirty!' corner where all of the organic debris that a garden generates is turned into gardeners' gold, ie. compost. Being a large garden we generate correspondingly large amounts of material, which we deal with in a semi-industrial fashion. Our compost corner is a dedicated space with an all-weather tarmac surface, several drains to absorb any run-off, and a fairly chunky 35HP shredder which can be loaded using the front-end loader on our largest tractor. All organic material that is not pest- or disease-ridden, or a noxious weed, is collected in a large pile in the middle of the area. Once we have sufficient to justify starting the machine, normally every fortnight, we start her up and have a shred. The beast pulverises the material and reduces it to about a quarter of its original volume, very useful in itself but more importantly, it creates a much larger surface area upon which the bacteria that perform the miracle of aerobic decomposition can feed. Wihtin hours, the temperature of the shredded material is rising fast, hopefully sufficiently to pasteurise the material and leave us with a weed-free end product. Each time we shred, the pile is pushed up and every couple of months it's completely turned to reignite the composting process. After six months that pile is then shifted to another area of the yard where it is left to mature.
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