Jamie’s Little Allotment: Gardening tips for tomato plants and peach trees

In his weekly Jamie’s Little Allotment column, gardener Jamie Marsh discusses tomato plants and peach trees...

All the hard work we have put in over the last several months is starting to pay off.

The allotment is producing plenty to take to the kitchen, beans and courgettes will need picking almost daily.

Try to harvest courgettes before they become too big and watery - although they seem like they are just appearing overnight at the moment.

Now the beans have made it to the top of the wigwam, pinch the growing shoots out to prevent them from getting too heavy and it will promote the plants to grow nice and bushy.

We should do the same with our tomatoes as well, now they have reached the roof of the greenhouse and have lots of fruit on the vine, nip out the top and keep removing the side shoots because we desperately want the plants to put their energy into making tomatoes and not more foliage.

Too much foliage can start to cause problems with your tomato plants.

With the heat in the greenhouse and the constant watering, we will be creating humid conditions, which will only lead to one thing, blight, and that’s one thing nobody wants because it can decimate your beloved tomato plants in just a few days.

So to try and keep the dreaded blight away, remove the lower leaves up to your first truss of fruit. Also at this point in the season, I remove roughly 50% of the leaves all the way up the plants

Not only will the increased ventilation and airflow help to reduce the risk of blight taking hold, but removing some of the leaves will also allow more light into the ripening fruits.

Another job I’ve done this week is pruning and tying in my little fan-trained peach tree. Now we’ve eaten all the absolutely delicious peaches, it’s time to tidy the new growth up.

It’s quite easy to do when you're fan training, or espalier your tree because you’re just trying to keep that fan shape.

Step back and get a good look at the tree, this is mine’s third year so I can see the shape well.

I removed any new growth which was growing towards or away from the wall and tied in the new horizontal growth.

I haven’t got a huge space on the wall for it to grow so I have to keep the side horizontal growth in check.

The reason we prune peaches in spring and summer is because they are actively growing.

If the peach tree pruning takes place when they are growing in spring and summer, it makes them less susceptible to disease or dieback.

If pruned in the dormant season, as you would in winter with the likes of apple or pear trees, they are at risk of diseases, such as silver leaf disease entering the pruning cuts.

Peach trees are also more prone to dieback than other fruit trees and pruning peach trees in winter can negatively impact their cold hardiness.

There is a bit of a science to perfectly pruning all trees, especially fruit trees, so I recommend having a look online for the exact process.

If you’ve got any questions about peach trees or anything else in the garden send me an email to Jamieslittleallotment@gmail.com