Everyone wants to know about pests and the best way to take them out. But rather than preoccupying yourself with warfare, sometimes the best approach is a peaceful one, simply letting them know that your patch is off-limits. In this top five, we show you how to walk the line of conflict and peace in modern pest warfare.
"It's not a matter of life or death - it's far more important than that"*. And the tomato is far more important that just a vegetable (or a fruit). It is cultural icon, a good vs evil masterpiece and the pin up (vegetable or fruit) for the home growing revolution.
There has never been a greater fall from grace (forget the Roman Empire, forget Brittany Spears). Once widely recognised as an aphrodisiac, the modern tomato often goes unnoticed in a salad or a sandwich. It has become the wedge or slice of hydration, more an ingredient that add moisture to a meal than a flavour in itself. Once typified by atypical size, colour, shape and taste, this fading legend is now as uniform and in sync as the military of a dictatorship.
But the tomato is making a comeback and it gathers momentum now. It is the one variety that gets people out of bed each spring (and maybe back in bed circa summer...hubba, hubba). It seems to stir something inside - helping to raise our joint middle finger to the mass produced, homogenised food industry that has stolen it from us. We now have the responsibility of putting the colour back into the tomato, and back into food in general, and we're doing it at our ground zero - the veggie patch.
With more than 3000 varieties in its extended family it is hard to know where to begin. Cherries, beefsteaks, hybrids, the ones smuggled in from Italy by your friend's cousin's grandfather? This is not a time for indecisiveness. It is clarity and focus that are needed. So let us provide it for you with our Top 10 Best Tomato Varieties (in no particular order...because it'd be like naming your favourite child)
In what is commonly thought of the lesser of the two growing seasons, we can still become overwhelmed by the number of planting choices available. That's because in our mild climate with its mild winters, the cool season presents an abundance of opportunities.
Varieties that typically fall into the spring planting calendar in the northern hemisphere, such as peas, broccoli and broad beans, are kind enough to grace our patch now. The skill is in deciding what plant will present the most value and is most likely to succeed. If the cool season is typical of one thing (other than choices), it is pests that seem to revel in the abundance of opportunities themselves.
So we present you our top 5 autumn varieties. We've selected them based on a few things, such as yield value, ease to grow and resistance to disease. But we've also thrown in our own personal 'je nais se quoi', which is that thing we can't describe, something so intangible, but a reason nonetheless why we want to grow it. We also include the best methods for getting them set and exempt from the pests that tend to wreak havoc.
There is no better memory for a child than those created in a garden and we can say that with assertion. This is because we’re often reminded that we continue to behave like children, so perhaps these memories are closer and stronger than we realise.
It's the smell of tomato foliage that stirs the strongest sense of nostalgia. It comes from the earliest years exploring towering tomato plants in our Nonna and Nonno's veggie patch. It feels like the first distinct memory, but then there's a few others tangled in there too, yet they all seem to revolve around the garden. This is why so many parents strive to lure the kids out.
Sometimes it feels that all we do is fight the force. We make plans - of who we may like to marry, or what job we want or even what we’d like to grow in the garden - and despite our best intent, and exerting our own forces to control the outcomes, a greater force wins out. Some people call this ‘fate’, or ‘inevitably’, but whatever it’s called it raises a pretty sensible question: why fight something that can’t be controlled? Why not just accept that you've married a babe with blonde hair and not brown, and begin to flow with the force.
It’s a question we always find ourselves pondering when in the autumn garden. We’ve just spent the last months in a war with our tomatoes and basil and zucchinis, and all the other glory vegetables, and it’s a mess. Purveying the dead limbs and rotting fruit, and now the scavengers coming in to salvage what’s left, we wonder at what we have created. Sure there’s some battles we’ve won, and some we have lost, but meanwhile: the plant that mysteriously popped up in the compost heap has been the season’s champion.
