Tassie Tomato ripening

I have some Tomatoes ripening. As you can see in the photo below, this is the first tomato I will be picking this year (and I will pick tomorrow morning to go on my bacon and egg muffin!!!). The variety is kotlas and this year confirmed the results of two years ago that it is a very early ripening tomato.

"kotlas" tomato ripening Jan 12th 2013

As an update on the other varieties:

• Steve Solomon's highly recommended Legend looks like it will mature around the end of Jan. His recommended Gold Nugget is also close at hand with their small yellow cherry toms.
• Riesenstraube which means bunch of grapes in German will be that. I do not think they will be ready till February, however they have a profuse amount of flowers and grapes and I am hoping for a bumper crop of red cherries off these.
• Hill Billy has a large number of good sized tomato already formed and I have been surprised by the vigorous growth of this unknown variety to me. Hard to tell how far away from ripening but I would say later this month.
• The indeterminates are a little further off still as to be expected. In the hothouse there is some roma almost ready along with tommy toe. Out in the veggie patch, the rouge de marmande are still growing and have fruit on them along with Mamma Mia. There is one of the four Rouge that seems to have been a dud seed and is small and growing too slowly for our summer. The Romas are also moving along but the fastest growing of my indeterminate vines has been Break 0'day. I reckon the majority of harvest will be mid Feb onwards from this lot.

kotlas close up

 The corn has been growing well since my inital mysterious disappearance of half the first plantings in late October. I think it was birds but never caught anything in the act. Nevermind, this just means my harvest should last longer with half the crop more advanced the the other half.

Corn

Broccoli. We eat a large amount of broccoli with most of the kids also eating it. However this spring/summer I first dropped the ball in October and got hammered by slugs. Then this year the aphids seemed to arrive and set that crop back a bit. Last season was plain sailing for my summer broccoli apart from the usual fortnightly spraying of Dipel for caterpillar control. But this year has shown that regular observations is needed. I removed the aphids with spraying pyrethrum and things seem in control, however the set back has cost months in combination with losing seedlings to slugs and damaged seedlings while controlling slugs (regular night time visits with scissors!!!)  I recently decided to try a new variety to me which is Summer Purple however I germianted them in the hothouse for planting out. This is not the normal recommendation by some gardening experts however I did not want mysterious losses to slugs/snails or birds this time.

Broccoli "Summer Purple"

Watermelon is forming female flowers