With this in mind I've come up with the following bullet points.
- Varieties.....at the minute Cedrico is the one to beat. Gold Star has thin skins and tends to split easily. Sow indoors mid Feb for August shows and mid March for September shows and beyond. (Midlands UK timings)
- Grow in bottomless pots sunk into the greenhouse border soil. Fill the pots with good quality compost and plant strong, healthy plants, preferably with the first flower truss just visible. Push a strong cane into the pot, down into the border soil at the same time.
- Sink a lemonade bottle upside down into the border soil between each pot. The bottom of the bottle, in effect now the top is cut off creating a sort of funnel. At first watering is into the bottomless plant pot but as the roots get down into the soil water into the lemonade bottles which seeps into the soil going straight to the roots. Each plant will need a good couple of pints each day in mid-summer. The border soil surface needs to be dry towards harvest time. Tomatoes like a hot, dry atmosphere and keeping the soil surface dry helps. It also reduces the risk of moisture marking the skins or fungal infections attacking the plants.
- Two weeks before planting work a generous helping of blood, fish and bone and some seaweed meal into the border soil.
- Tie plants to the canes regularly and pinch out side shoots at 2-3". I also connect all the vertical canes to a horizontal cane about 3' up, which in turn is attached to the greenhouse framework. Too often in the past I've had plants fall over and canes break so now I don't allow this to happen.
- Start feeding when the first tomato on the bottom truss is the size of a pea. I use home made comfrey feed, homemade nettle feed and tomorite used in turn at EVERY watering. Little but often. From early August I now use soot water as a fourth feed. I'm now convinced this improves skin and calyx colour. You only need a dash of this jet black liquid in each can.
- Consider thinning out trusses to give fruits room to swell, by cutting out every other one when small. This will give you fewer, but rounder fruits and is an important consideration when being judged.
- You may also need to support the fruits as a heavily laden truss can rip itself from the main stem. I twine string around the truss and tie to the horizontal cane mentioned above. I find the upper trussses don't need supporting as not only are the fruits smaller there don't seem to be as many fruits on each truss.
- Examine your plants as often as you can to make sure they are looking healthy. Don't panic. You can often mistake the odd discolouration for something serious but I find the odd leaflet will go yellow at the tips. Look out for caterpillar droppings on the upper side of the leaflets. The culprit can often be found above the droppings but can be well hidden so don't give up til you find the f*cker. The south american tomato moth is the culprit and is moving across europe apparently. I found about four last season. The best deterrent is enviromesh over all openings, important if, like me, you like to leave the door open during mid summer at night for good ventilation during the hottest spells.
- If it's three weeks before your show and the fruits aren't ripening you can do a couple of things. First, cut back foliage to allow light in and also shock the plant into ripening some fruit. You can cut quite a lot of the bottom foliage back, say cutting the leaflets by a half to two thirds. Tired leaves are stripped right back to the main stem. By this time my plants have been trained from the top of the canes along strong strings up into the apex of the greenhouse so there is still plenty of foliage to keep the plants ticking along. This can make things quite dark so be removing some of the foliage all over the plant you are allowing light in. You can also hang ripe bananas amongst your plants. This is an old greengrocer trick and the ethylene gas produced by the ripe bananas wafts over the tomatoes and encourages ripening. The photo below shows my greenhouse before any thinning has taken place about mid-August this year. Not bad for an unheated 8'x6' aluminium greenhouse!
- The afternoon before the show you need to choose your fruits. Ideally they need to be about 60-65mm diameter so cut a couple of cardboard gauges to help you. I have one at 60mm and one at 65mm. As I pick the likely looking fruits I will check the diameter and put into a couple of sets, as very often I am looking for two sets, one for the main class and one for a collection such as Top Tray. They need to be as round as possible with fresh calyces, cut as far from the knuckle as you can. Any with skin blemishes are discarded. Ones with minor imperfections will be put to one side for consideration later if i'm struggling to make a set. I check the depth and shape from the side as well as from above as two fruits the same diameter can often be completely different shapes in side profile. You may want to take a few spares although I find this unnecessary with Cedrico as the skins stay hard for a long time. Gold Star was very prone to splitting between picking and staging.
- I pack each fruit carefully in tissue paper for transportation to the show. The most important thing I did this year was to make a compartmentalised wooden carrying box with a lid. I can now put other boxes on top of this without fear of the fruits coming to any harm.
- Before leaving for the show, 'stage' them in your kitchen for best effect and then place them back in the box in the order you will be staging them at the show. It also allows you to double check the condition of each fruit in good light. Do no polish or wash the skins if you can avoid it. Sometimes you may have a bit of dirt under the calyx so wet a cotton bud and use that to clean it you have to.
- At the show you can stage your fruits without stress knowing you have chosen the best possible selection.
- After your plants are spent, remove them and burn. I very often have to extract a huge root system as the plants have gone way out into the border soil. Shake off as much of the soil as you can. The canes should be washed with weak Jeyes fluid solution and stored in a dry place for use next season. The greenhouse needs a good clean with Jeyes fluid or Armillatox and the border soil can also be drenched with the same solution. During the winter pour several buckets of rain water over your soil to stop a build up of salts. About every 4 or 5 years I would advise emptying out your border soil and replacing with fresh soil, say from your onion or leek beds.
