Soot water

My daughter's boyfriend has been knocking about an old fireplace in their new house and has managed to bag me up a sack full of soot. I thought a photo of some dirty old soot wouldn't be too inspiring so here is a better one!............





















Anyways, it's an ingredient that the great tomato grower Chalie Maisey recommends for giving tomatoes a deep red colour and also to keep the calyces looking freshly green. For the last few years my later tomatoes have been showing a yellowing calyx which can lead to downpointing at the highest level. As I say, this only tends to affect my toms later in the showing season and as Malvern is relatively late show I did notice this year that my fruits showed this fault against the winning ones which were all nice and green. Obviously the top growers must have some secret and I'm reliably informed soot is the answer. Here is set of my tomatoes from Sturton a couple of years ago (albeit a winning set) which is held the week after Malvern. The yellowing calyces are quite visible.

Apparently you put the soot in a hessian sack and immerse them in a water butt, using the resultant solution in turn with your usual feeds. I may experiment with 50% of my plants being fed with soot water and 50% not to see if there is really any discernible difference.