Page 15 - Simply Vegetables Summer 2023

2023 Early March
2022 Dometica
growing more plants and revisiting that old favourite, San Marzano. This variety requires to be harvested when really, really red – not just a mere orange. Unfortunately the 2022 dried tomatoes will run out any time soon, but I am not quite finished.
A few of the dried tomatoes are infused
in Extra Virgin olive oil with some of my home-grown garlic, plus a touch of chilli flakes. The deterring factor here is the cost of the Extra Virgin olive oil, it can of course be reused for stir fries or dressing, I should know the verdict in a about week.
In addition to tomatoes and courgettes I also dried some Romanian sweet peppers, despite being thin - walled, they dried okay and were used in salads. These were merely cut in half, lengthways with the seeds scraped out. These particular sweet peppers will ripen outdoors.
Times
I normally set the timer for eight hours and then disappear, some may be dried by then but most won’t, depending on how thick or how thin you sliced them.
commercial growbags to give the borders a rest, in 2019 I could no longer buy the larger commercial growbags so I made my own compost and used 10litre pots,
You may require another eight hours, for this period they are best supervised, with my Vigo drier. Which has six circular shelves, the fruit or veg might want rearranging, i.e. move the bottom shelves up to the top and the top ones down to the bottom.
Culture
Up an until 2019 I much preferred to grow my tomatoes in the greenhouse or polytunnel borders, some years I used
this worked okay and the following year I did the same but upped the pot size to 15litre, the growing medium was 3.2.1. 3parts top soil, 2parts peat (still looking for 200litre bales of peat substitute) and
1 part sharp sand, I can grow just about anything in this. For the greenhouse plants I mix in some
base fertilizer. In 2021 I
I much preferred to grow my tomatoes in the greenhouse or polytunnel borders
experimented with saucers; the ideal size is the 50cm ones, last year all the tomatoes, peppers and chilli peppers were grown in
Dried varieties of tomato and pepper with home grown garlic in extra virgin olive oil a few chilli flakes
Simply Vegetables 15