Gardening wins and losses....

Our cherry tomatoes have been pretty prolific this season so far. They are currently growing a second round of new shoots and flowers for a summer crop.

Because I was so excited about how well the cherry tomatoes were going, I thought I'd try growing a different variety. This one is a photo I took of my Mamma Mia tomato plant a few weeks after I planted it.

Sadly, it's not looking this healthy now. I can't bear to take a photo of the plant because it now looks like it is on death's door. I think it outgrew the pot before I realised. Last week I noticed that a lot of the tomatoes had big brown patches on the bottom of them.

This is called blossom end rot. Not good. Caused by a variety of things mostly related to soil quality, and possibly by wet weather on planting followed by a very long dry spell, as we've had up here. And maybe by outgrowing the pot as well. My Google hunting told me that some tomato varieties are more susceptible than others. So I'm going to try again with a different type (and a bigger pot) when we get back from our holidays in October.

Happily, the cherry tomatoes are still producing to make me feel better about the Mamma Mia fail. These are some that I picked this morning. We've also had one or two strawberries coming through as well.

And the herbs are going really well. The rosemary, flat leaf parsley, mint and oregano are looking fantastic.

So all in all, a pretty good gardening winter. Hoping to get some radishes planted over the next little while too.