How tall can a tomato plant grow?

To infinity and beyond?!?!?

I had always assumed I was destined to be hopeless at growing tomatoes. Every attempt I had ended in failure. Whether I bought seeds and grew from them, or went to a garden shop and bought ready to go plants, they would start off great and then just die really early in the season.

My garden beds have now been in for about 3 or 4 years, and started off using the no-dig garden technique which is to use alternate layers of greens and browns. I started off using lucerne hay and chicken manure, and now just top up with sugar cane mulch each year ($10 a bag from a warehouse in Epping). The worms absolutely love the sugar cane mulch, and it all gets converted into rich soil that the plants love.

Last year I got a Tommy Toe plant from Bunnings and thought I'd pop it one of the garden beds for a bit of a laugh, thinking it would follow in the suit of other failed attempts. To my surprise, this plant got so big and so heavy, I was forced to to tie multiple stakes together to keep the plant upright, the thing grew HUGEEEEEE!





One windy day in Melbourne over summer last year, the stakes could not handle the weight and bent in half. The plant at this stage had already grown 2 metres, and I was quite upset by the incident. But I could not give up, and decided on a different strategy of using a 1 metre wooden stake, followed by a 3 metre 90mm PVC downpipe. This seemed to be a lot better, and can't really see this snapping or falling over despite the weight.

So this year I eagerly anticipate both the height and the number of tomatoes I will get in the garden beds. All 6 of the garden beds have 2 plants each, so I may even create an aussie version of the famous Passata making day that the Italians have each year.

Cacao - Fruit of the Gods

Did you know that Cacao (aka Chocolate) was once a form of currency back in the Mayan days? 

These days, it is grown within 20° of the equator, with Ivory Coast being the major producer. The CSIRO have performed some trials in far North Queensland, but the labour costs in Australia has really prevented the commercial take up of growing Cacao as there is no current way to use machines to perform this task.

I went to a few nurseries and asked if it was possible to get a Cacao seedling in... each time I was laughed at suggesting it wasn't possible to grow Cacao in Melbourne. The challenge was set, and I hunted around for either seeds or a plant to grow.

In tact Cacao pod

Cacao nibs

I hunted around on Ebay, and actually found someone selling pods from Cacao trees grown in Australia under the CSIRO trial. I knew the seeds needed to be inside the pod for viability, so getting my hands on a fresh Cacao pod without customs confiscating the package was a bonus.

Germination was fairly easy, 2 nibs were inserted into each Jiffy pellet, and it wasn't long before I had close to 20 Cacao plants. The new leaves of Cacao plants are translucent, so delicate, and then turn paper like when they turn a deep shade of green.

Fast forward over a year, and some of my plants are now close to a metre tall. They were all kept in a tent in the garage over winter, where they pretty much all lost their leaves despite being under a horticulture light to keep them warm.

In December of 2011, I decided to try my luck of putting one of the Cacao plants in a pot outside. It gets extremely dry here in Melbourne over summer, so lots of misting is required to keep the plant moist for a long a period as possible.

Taken on 2011-12-18

Cacao grow under the canopy of rainforest trees, so receive dappled sunlight in their natural environment. I decided to put this directly under my front entrance, and this meant the plant only received a period of about 15 minutes of morning sunlight for the entire day. I still assumed that this was going to be too much for the plant, and also with the lack of humidity, that the plant would slowly wither and die.

Taken on 2012-01-23

It has now been over a month since the plant has been outside, and I've now moved it to a position where it gets a bit more sunlight. Let's hope that twice daily misting will allow it to survive and flourish, I've taken a look in the last day or so and I can see new leaves forming.

With the confidence that having the plant outside under the shade wasn't going to kill it, I decided on the weekend to pot up my best growing plant from the garage, which is just shy of a metre tall! 

These plants will need to come inside over winter, who knows where the hell I am going to put them with the other 3 Frangipanis I've committed to keeping indoors as well.

Garden Bed Update - August 2011

I had mixed success from the garden beds last year, but I think this year will be a lot better as the organic materials from the previous year have had time to decompose and be devoured by the army of worms that lay within.

This time last year, I had put the garden beds in place and filled them with layers of lucerne hay, chicken manure, soil and sugar cane mulch. While I allowed for about 3 months before planting, I think there was still too much nitrogen in the soil for the chilli plants to really flourish in the intense biological conditions.

The above is the one garden bed out of the six that I haven't topped up since last year. Despite layering all the ingredients to the brim of the garden beds, it has sunk heavily to the point that it's now less than 50% full.

The rest of the beds have been topped up with compost that's been in my compost tumbler, dynamic lifter, 6 bags of soil and finally more sugar cane mulch.

When I pull back the top layer of sugar cane mulch from the topped up garden beds I can generally find a magnitude of worms, which to me means they love to feed on the wet sugar cane mulch. I hope that the conditions for the chilli plants this year results in a bumper crop which will in turn be converted to some seriously hot sauce!

The best way to start chilli seeds

The way I germinate chilli seeds is not a conventional method that others would do. I've tried putting seeds in wet paper towel and then in plastic sandwich bags, soaking the seeds in a weak tea solution and then planting, and just popping them straight into soil.

But nothing quite beats the method I am now using to germinate my seeds. I have to credit Neil from The Hippy Seed Company for the idea, and it's really made it quite easy and consistent to germinate the seeds.

What we have in the above is a plastic container with 30 lots of coco jiffy pellets, floating on top of water that is heated to 30C with a small fishtank heating rod, and a few air stones at the bottom to just circulate some oxygen around.

While I've been able to germinate with the other methods, this has easily been the most consistent because with a lid on the plastic container I am easily able to keep the humidity at high levels and stop the jiffy pellets from drying out.

As I travel quite a bit, it means I can sort of forget about the chamber other than cleaning the water out once a week and making sure I disinfect it from all the algae that starts to form within the water. Once I see roots penetrating the fabric webbing of the peat pellet, I put the pellet in a small pot with some soil and move to under a LED light somewhere.

These 14 plants are house in a small tent in the garage. There's a fan that blows the air around, yet it still has a very high humidity because there are clay balls at the bottom of the orange tray filled with water, and as it evaporates it contributes to the high humidity - which chillies love!

Overwintering chillies

Most people think chillies are annuals, which means they grow, flower, fruit then die.

Chillies are in fact perennials, meaning that if you can keep them alive over winter protecting them from frosts, they'll survive and in fact give you a head start for the new season.

The above is an Asian Birdseye in one of the garden beds that I cut down about a week ago, but it's now sprouted and hopefully will go nuts in the next few weeks as the weather starts to warm up. There is another 14 plants in that garden bed that seem to have survived and have all sprouted.

I grew these from my own seeds, and I have a theory that because I took the seeds from a pod that has already grown in the Melbourne climate seem to be more likely survive our winter.

This one is more of a surprise as it's one of my Bhut's, which are from the Capsicum Chinense family and not really known to survive our winter. Again, this along with another 7 plants in the front row of the garden were grown from seeds taken from previous year plants.

The majority of my other chillies have died, and as I expect this I generally grow extra plants to replace these.

Let's hope I get a head start this year with the overwintered plants, it's definitely been a warmer than usual August here in Melbourne and I expect to be picking some Asian Birdseyes in early to mid November with the way it's heading.

There's a weed in my garden

Thankfully the weed in my garden is edible, in fact it's loved my dessert lovers around the world.

Raspberries are just one of the berries growing in my garden, but I never quite expected them to take off as well as they have. I bought a single cane from Bunnings this year, and now it's turned into a monster!

You can't see it in the picture, but I've had to buy some 2.4 metre stakes and put some sort of plastic wire between the two to support those 2 gigantic canes that have sprouted up. Before I tied the canes up, the canes were able to sustain themselves, but the moment there was any rain these things become very heavy and pretty much slumped down to the ground.

Apart from the 2 big canes shown in the above picture, there are another 4 or 5 sprouting in the pot. It's not the canes growing in the pot that I'm worried about, it's these canes that have somehow start shooting up from the ground where the raspberry plant has spread from holes in the pot into the surrounding garden.

This leaves me with a dilemma, do I let them flourish and see how they go, or do I cut them now knowing that these things could invade my garden and take it right over?

Pumpkin vs Butterfly Bush

I only have a single pumpkin plant in the garden, it's very well hidden in the corner where there's minimal sun and I couldn't quite work out where else I could put it.

Of course the plant is in a pot, and despite the lack of sun, I've still managed to get at least one ripe pumpkin that I'm eagerly looking forward to harvest.

But I didn't quite realise how invasive the vines are, and they pretty much just go in whatever direction they want to. After clearing a whole heap of grass that had spread from the neighbour's property, I realised one of the vines has decided to take on the drought resistant butterly bush that's been around since we first bought the house.

The butterfly bush has spread like wildfire at the front of my house, so here's hoping in this David vs Goliath battle that the pumpkin vine manages to take a few of the butterfly bush out of action!

I wonder if anyone would be keen for some Chilli Pumpkin soup in April perhaps?