This weekend I’ve been kindly asked to speak at the Electric Picnic Festival in County Laois, Ireland.

As part of a series of talks on sustainability in the Green Room in the Body and Soul area I’ll be talking about my experiences growing my own food over the past year at 12 o’clock on Saturday and Sunday.  For those of you who haven’t been there before, the Body and Soul area is really cool, with lots of interesting cultural activities, great food, diverse music and art installations.

I’m really looking forward to it, if a tad nervous.  I can’t wait to see the reaction we get.  If anyone is heading to the Picnic do drop by the Green Room at 12 o’clock on Saturday and say hi.  Everyone at the talk will get some free seeds and if they’re lucky get a carrot grown on my balcony too!

If for whatever reason you can’t catch me at the Green Room, I can be found rocking out at Flock of Seagulls.  See you there!

I had an interesting conversation the other day with the folks who are responsible of the Dartmouth Square Project and  Edenbee about our upcoming talks at Electric Picnic. During the conversation their resident gardening authority  offered a couple of tips to help put my tomatoes on the fasttrack to ripeness.

I followed up our conversation with a google to verify the claims. It seems there are two things required for the tomatoes to ripen:

1. The tomato fruit need access to light and so can’t be in shade.
2.  The tomato plant needs to divert as much energy as possible to fruit production.

Luckily these two things can be accomodated easily by pruning branches, leaves and any fruits or flowers which are too dead or small to make it at this stage. Removing leaves reduce the amount of shade the fruit are in and also reduces the amount of effort the plants puts into leaf production and maintenance.

Admittedly, I should have been on this way earlier. As my grandmother would have said – I should have kept the amount of main stalks to 1 per plant (the Internet seems to think 2 is ok too) and remove any “suckers“. I haven’t been doing this. This is due to one part oversight on my part (read: laziness) and one part the difficulty in navigating around a microgreenhouse which is jam-packed with growth.

I removed as much of the plant as I could without disturbing the growth. Hopefully we will see some more ripe fruit beyond the 6 red tomatoes we have had so far. The plants outside are doing great – it certainly looks like bringing them out of the greenhouse was a good move!

The overgrown greenhouse, which as I’m sure you can imagine is difficult to get at to prune:

Below are our cherry tomato plants, post-pruning. Admittedly, you can’t see much difference to how they looked before. Rest assured that much was removed and it took a good while!

Thanks to everyone who responded to the survey I put out there a while ago looking for help with my balcony dilemmas. As promised, here is the upshot of the crowd’s decisions!

1. Should I put the tomato plants outside in the unpredictable Irish weather?

At the time I took the results, the winning option was to put the cherry tomato plants out, which I did. It does seem that the option to leave them both in the greenhouse had a late resurgence though. Luckily enough we have had a mild couple of months (In Ireland, mild=good in the summer) and the tomato plants have flourished outside, arguably moreso than the two left in the greenhouse. There are plenty of green tomatoes appearing so it’s just a matter of getting them to ripen. More on that in the next post!

2. What should be done about our greenfly infestation?

As it turns out,  this question probably should have read – ” What should be done about our greenfly, spider mite, fly, flea beetle, caterpillar, etc. infestation?” I actually ended up trying three of these options in the end!

First up was soapy water. I tried spraying, showering and bathing, with mixed success. Well it failed really – even dunking the whole plants in a bath of soapy water. It’s also a significant inconvenience as you can imagine and makes you feel like a bit of a twit!

Next I introduced a ladybird but it went AWOL with no significant improvement. I might have needed more than one though in fairness.

Lastly I tried an all-in-one, spray today / eat tomorrow bug spray containing pyrethrins. I’m not sure if this is organic per se but from googling and reading the back of the spray it definitely doesn’t seem evil. There’s planty of room between organic and evil right?

This has worked wonders and there is a noticeable improvement in all the plants concerned. I’m looking forward to chilis being back on the menu.

3. …how should I deal with these uber-tall potato plants?

I tied up the potato plants to stop them breaking as suggested. It turns out I didn’t really need to as they all just died down anyway. The leaves seemed to be attacked by flea beetles along the way for good measure. I was expecting them to go on to flower before harvesting so this was a tad disappointing:

I started rooting around down one end of the trough for potatoes and found some (400 grams) which we duly ate. They were nice too!

A potato-eating action shot:

Thanks again to all that voted. Next up I am going to look at how to cut back tomato plants to maximize yield and ensure ripening. Anyone with any ideas or experience in the area, please send ‘em on!