Growing Salsa

Kevin and I love to work out in the garden together and we thought that we would try growing some veggies this year. In particular we wanted to make our own salsa so we decided to grow some tomatoes and peppers. Someone told us that there wasn't any way that we could grow tomatoes in our back garden because it just doesn't get to be tomato growing weather in England. We took this on as a challenge.

We went and bought a tomato growing kit from B&Q and planted them on April 1, 2008. Our kitchen window sill faces south and has great sun.

Nine days later the seedlings were all about 1 inch tall and we thinned them out to 1 or 2 plants per pot. I also started growing some coriander and realized after it came up that it wasn't the plant I thought it was. It looks a lot like cilantro which is the plant I wanted to grow for our salsa...how silly of me. I went back to the store to find cilantro to grow but they didn't have it. Looks like I'll have to buy it in the store when it comes time to make our salsa.

By April 23, we had already put them in bigger plastic cups to grow on their own in the window sill for a couple weeks. Now they were ready to plant outside.

We dug up the little bit of dirt we had available to us that looked like it might get some sun. We had about a 4 ft x 8 ft plot to work with for our tomatoes, peppers, beans and peas. We fertilized it and added some good top soil to the ground and worked it up the old fashion way with shovels and rakes...no tillers here.

With a lot of early cool weather and slugs attacking new seedlings, we only got 3 bean plants to grow and only one of them produced about 3 beans (better luck next year).

The peas did pretty well. About 10 plants grew and we got two dinner servings of peas which we used in some sweet and sour chicken stir fry around July 13th. The tomatoes were doing pretty well, but our pepper plants got hit pretty hard as well by the slugs. I think we put them out in ground too early.

By the first week of September, the weather started turning cool again but our tomato plants were huge and very heavy. We only had canes and wire holding them up and there are loads of tomatoes growing on them. The question is will they all turn red.

Here are a few of the cherry tomatoes that seem to be turning. We picked them in mid September and used them in Kevin's salad for lunch. We'll have to wait a couple more days or a week to see if the big ones will start turning. If they don't turn, my friend Tina just gave me a recipe to make fried green tomatoes. More to come...