Have I sold 16 people a pig in a poke?

[PiggyPokkyFool]

Name changed as this is very outing.
The facts: Saw YouTube video about growing tomatoes from a slice of tomato, had some v tasty cherry ones from supermarket so planted 3 slices with low expectations. 3 weeks later, 54 seedlings, transferred to larger pots expecting to lose half, 52 survived - nearly all grew looking super healthy - had 49 tomato plants. Couldn't possibly use all so planted some, gave away some and had 28 tomato plants left. Got the bright idea of selling them on our local group for 50p each - sold all bar 3 which I offered some to my much older, much wiser chum and he said " Oh, no thanks as they are probably F1s so won't produce anything". Have I sold 16 people a pig in a poke? Never mind friends who think I am a great grower

Delurking to say I love this thread. If only I didn't have 3 big boy dogs who manage to kill most things in the garden with their toxic wee I would be joining you!

@fourquenelles so delighted you are enjoying it. Could you keep the front garden for your growing if your boys are peeing in the back? I grow a LOT in containers in our front paved garden. The tomatoes, cucumbers, strawberries big and small, cucamelons pictured are all in containers - some are even in hanging baskets in the shrubs. Start with one or two things and see how you go. I started with a strawberry plant 15 years ago and now........

Great idea. My front tiny patch is a real suntrap. The Greek oregano and French lavender have taken over!

@BobTheDuvet - they might be pigs in pokes yet as they are all green - not a hint of colour in even one which I am checking for hourly daily. Also once we get the bit of colour I will know what size they will be - I have a horror of 300 giant beefs on my slender stems and the whole lot crashing down around me.
It has been a few minutes hours, so off to check again
This is why an allotment has never been for me as on days off I'm out checking and picking every few hours.

Same here piggy - all green! Though we’re getting 3-4 edible blueberries a day to tide us over . Yours are looking great, fingers crossed. We should have this thread every year, it’s brill!

If i get tomatoes I'll grown them again next year and charge 75p instead of 50p
Well done on the blueberries - mine have always been a total failure!
Come on yellow/orange/red tomatoes - we are counting on you!!

Ooh i didn't do that @BobTheDuvet and maybe I should have - probably too late now - I still have hundreds of flowers too. Is it too late do you think? Happy to take any advice available.
I nipped off suckers but that is all I did - we will have a bumper harvest of green ones anyway - how much longer do you reckon we have for things to ripen? At least 6 weeks I would say and at a push nine as temperatures don't really drop much until mid October, usually, in London.

I have snipped two today Bob and we had our first cucumber for lunch - well not all of it obviously. Ripe raspberries are slowing down with lots of flowers appearing for the second wave and cucamelons are getting much bigger - yay us!!

Please note that is another one behind at the bottom of the picture - my cucumber is not deformed!!

Hi everyone, i thought i'd lost you but here you are still!
How's everyone getting on? It all looks and sounds lovely! I've just posted a pic of my potatoes on the allotment/veg patch thread. Something has attacked them and they were mostly unedible. The fact it was so difficult to even dig into the bed it's so dry and heavy clay cloddy, might be why my carrots and beets haven't done well either. I just don't know, being new to this.

Piggy.. i like the sound of your container garden. I think this is the answer tbh. My soil isn't so much soil as builders rubble with a dose of quick-drying cement thrown in!!

I didn't do this last year, and I had quite a lot of unripened fruit left at the end of the season. I'm sure they are ripening faster since I did this. If you bring them indoors and leave them around, they will ripen.

The first year I did this, they didn't seem to be ripening at all - then I realised that although I was adding new green tomatoes to the bowl, the bowl wasn't getting fuller. Turns out that DS1 was eating them as soon as they turned red, so I always had a selection of just green and orange toms.

Bob, sorry to hear your potatoes failed . What variety did you try? Mine were Cara. I'll def try a slug resistant variety next time. Do you think it's def the heavy clay causing the issues? I wonder if in my case i should have watered and fed more. They were watered every other day but it's been so dry. When i dug around the plants it was solid.

Bump ... @BobTheDuvet

@BobTheDuvet .. Thanks for getting back to me. I knew you weren't ignoring me! That's annoying you lost your gardening threads. MN has been doing strange things lately.

Now we're having all this rain, i'd forgotten how dry June & July were. All i could remember was the dreadful spring weather we had. So it's likely i didn't water enough but as you say, any watering didn't seem to make any difference. It's like it needed a proper irrigation system. Our neighbours have a sprinkler they had going for hours on their veg patch.

Our beets were the same and the carrots didn't even grow.

I don't know whether digging in a ton of sand would help,.or i might try Clay Breaker which is £10 for a standard box. It's a calcium based product and reviews say it's v.effective. Apparently it might take years to get clay soil into a workable form!

.. Oh and i've got green manure seeds half price from the garden centre i'll plant in the autumn. Worth a try!

The butternut squashes sound fab.. do post a pic when you get a moment

Hello troops - I have been holding off posting as I really really wanted my next post to be - look at all my lovely red tomatoes but....... still nothing red!! Sorry about the potatoes - I used to grow them in sacks for a few years but they always looked so straggly by August and I didn't feel they paid their way so stopped doing it - though the kids still gleefully remember the jacket potato that we found one September that fed the four of us - it was enormous!!
So having no red tomatoes to show you, here are two handfuls of blackberries which I have just picked - lots of giant ones at the moment to go with my kilos of runner beans and a lb ot two of french beans.
But no red tomatoes....

@BobTheDuvet - I'm searching my cupboards for something red immediately - I am so so so overinvested in these tomatoes!!
Clay soil is a pain - we had one patch that was particularly bad/solid/caked and I broken it up as best I could then dug through wormery compost - put in cut up banana skins and crushed egg shells and any fallen flowers we had and all the worms I came upon in my digging and covered it over with some old leaves. It was a good bit better the next spring and I planted french and runner beans and left in the roots once the crop was over and the next year it was very much better. I tried adding a bit of sand that came back from Brittany with us (a surprising amount in shells and buckets and spades!) but it didn't really seem to do much.
This growing lark is just full of highs and lows - the joy of picking the wonderful cucumbers I have slightly dulls when the are growing beside hundreds of green tomatoes - nil desperandum troops!