bath tub tomatoes - STILL going!

We planted our bath tub tomatoes in March this year and here we are about to step into August, and they are still going - both cherry toms and 'standard' toms. Not only are the plants still alive, still producing quality fruit but they still have flowers on some of them! It's nuts and we are rapt.




I'm bringing the tomatoes inside as soon as they're almost ripe, to maximise the plant's energy and ripen as much of the fruit as possible, before the plants finally reach their end time.


Although some of them have just decided to go and grow a fourth leg or something, and sprout a new plant from themselves...
In amongst it all this pea/bean is having a ball climbing to the sky up through the tomato plants and their 'stake' (stick from the park). Here's it's twiggy straggly starting off (that have nearly been ripped out so many times - let that be a lesson to me!) that look like nothing good would come of it, right..? It actually isn't even green in most parts of it's start...



and here it is... not bad eh for a 'wild sown' one -

threw the seeds in and nothing happened for ages. Then one day we noticed this one. Must've grown by stealth eh.

Unfortunately, while it all LOOKS lovely in the pics, this is the most productive part of the garden at the moment - if only the other parts of the garden were as much. We're working on the rest. In the process of that we sold the cubby house so now have a great space for more fruit trees - I'm thinking about 5 dwarf ones, which could be really good. The kids can pick one tree each to plant.

The fruit tree list currently stands at: mulberry, lime, pomegranit, plum x2, angel peach, pinkabelle apple x2, granny smith apple, naval orange, washington orange, imperial mandarine, lilli pilli.
On top of that we're limited to sunshine spots bc of our lovely massive peppermint tree in the backyard that shades the chooks and has a swing and hammock swing hanging from it... so we would plant more if it wasn't there but I can't bring myself to get it cut down. Doesn't feel right in this time when the call is 'cut it down!' for almost everythign else!

This year was the best year we've had for the mandarine. The mulberry is always nuts and fruits twice a year but the others are still early days and either none or small quantities (ie not even double digits). So I want to get more in now, so they have time to get up and running - as much time as possible. Just gotta work out what we want to plant. It would be nice to have a variety of fruits and something fruiting all year round...