Looking Forward to New Varieties

Last week was generally on the cool side apart from Friday and Saturday which turned out to be much milder. We are now on a downward temperature trend for the rest of the month and into the beginning of February. There is the possibility of some snow this week, along with the cold temperatures, but the forecasts are far from certain about the snowfall. 

Temperature & Windchill Effects 21-27 January 2019

Sunday was a particularly windy day with the wind chill effect making it feel bitterly cold.

We did manage to get a few allotment jobs done and Sue has covered most of these in her blog post here.

With the new season's seed orders arriving in the post, and a couple of trips to local garden centres to supplement our online orders, a start to the new gardening year has begun even if we haven't yet sown any seeds. Each year we like to try a few new varieties of vegetables to see what we might be missing. It does means that over the years we've tried many different varieties, with potatoes and tomatoes the most prolific.

I think we've tried at least 43 different sorts of potato varieties. These are the ones I have photographic records of giving a list 43 different types. This year's new varieties will be Athlete, (a recommendation by Bill's Allotments 2 Plots of Heaven) Rudolph and British Queen. At the garden centre we thought Premiere would be new this year, but checking back we grew it back in 2012. We're also growing some Sarpo Mira this year, which doesn't appear on the list, but I can remember growing them in the past. It must have been a good few years ago.

Our Potato Varieties Over the Years

Casablanca Potatoes July 2017

We haven't tried quite as many tomato varieties, 41 if the listing below is correct but I'm sure there will be the odd omission. This year's new tomato variety will be Albenga. It's an Oxheart type originating from Northern Italy and a recommendation from Roger Brook the "No Dig Gardener". We were lucky enough to be given a couple of ripe tomatoes last year and we thought they tasted good and decided to give it a go.

Our Tomato Varieties Over the Years

Moneymaker Growing In 2011

Now I can't finish on tomatoes without mentioning our own record breaking tomato. Back in 2009 we grew some Brandywine tomatoes one of which grew to what we thought was an enormous size. We decided to make a YouTube video of this tomato being picked and sliced for sandwiches and called the video "A Monster Tomato". I know it's ten years ago now since we uploaded the video but since then it has had a staggering 206,000 views!. That's easily our most viewed video. I've added the video below just in case you are one of the few gardeners who hasn't seen it.

We now have some sharper scissors but I think the bread knife is still going strong.

Copyright: Original post from A Gardener's Weather Diary http://ossettweather.blogspot.co.uk/ author M Garrett