Regrets? I have a few....

No matter how experienced you are (or how experienced you think you are!) it's still possible to make basic mistakes that you should know better not to do. All season I have been kicking myself about my tomatoes and 2011 will be the first time in 11 years that I won't have won a class at any show during a season with toms. Indeed I haven't even picked up a place card as Westminster was the first show I managed to stage a set when I finally had a few ripe fruits ready from my late 2nd planting. I'm starting to get some very nice shaped ripe fruits coming now so I should be able to include a set of 6 on my Derby Top Tray collection at the end of the month.




My troubles began as I tried to plant earlier in order to get plenty of fruits to choose from for the Llangollen National. For the past few years I'd only had a few fruits ready for the August Bank Holiday weekend shows so my thinking was I needed to sow earlier to give me earlier ripening and more choice. I always plant my tomatoes around the Spring Bank Holiday weekend but this year I planted on the May Day weekend at the beginning of the month. We then had several nights of quite hard frost and despite covering each plant with newpaper they got chilled and never recovered. The thing is, it took a few weeks for the problem to show up as the plants went yellow and sickly, leading me to believe there was some nutrient problem which I tried to correct by giving the plants nitrogen and even aspirin! The answer I now know was much more basic.



It was all the more frustrating when I saw the winning sets of tomatoes at Llangollen. Medwyn Williams won, and my pal Mark Roberts was 2nd. Here is Medwyn's set:

Tomatoes are the only veg I would confidently say I would currently be able to win with at National level, and I hope I'm not being big headed when I say I could possibly have done so at Llangollen if I hadn't made such a monumental pig's dinner of my planting. However I did and as you have to be in it to win it I will now have put my money where my mouth is and make sure I don't do anything so stupid in 2012. As the National is at Malvern at the end of September my usual planting date is going to be cock-on so I really do intend to have a good go next year.