Tomatoes and Peppers

Last year was dismal for both tomatoes and peppers.

The pepper plants grew and flowered, but I was lucky to get a few peppers from several plants. I gave pepper plants to friends and they had 2-4 peppers from each plant. I had no chillis from about 8 chilli plants.

Some were grown in the greenhouse, some outside. The greenhouse ones grew faster and matured earlier, but only gave me one pepper. This year I have a few more varieties and have bought sweet pepper seeds to compare with the saved seeds I've been using from supermarket peppers.

I did get some tomatoes though. Some varieties did better than others, but I was too ill to make a proper note of which ones did best and tasted best. This year I'm repeating experiments.

The one tomato that I know did very badly 3 years running is Roma VF. It's a plum tomato, but the fruits it gave me were very small, and not many of them. This year I've replaced that with another plum variety just called Italian.

I do know Moneymaker and Gardners Delight grew well though. I've grown them over the last couple of years and not had any problem.

I will do better with pinching out tomatoes this year. I did ok with it last year, but when I got ill, the plants did get a bit neglected.

Another problem I found was that of shallow roots. The tomatoes and peppers were in large pots last year and I used a drip feeder in the greenhouse. I'm guessing the drip feeders wet the top of the soil so the roots just didn't grow down into the pot. I'll experiment with drip feeding some tomatoes and normal watering of others.