Eco Friendly Gift Shop Harvest Time

It's harvest time at Taylor Two eco concious gift shop! No I'm not harvesting gifts, I'm harvesting real actual food, that I have grown myself in my mini allotment as shown on our 'eco policies' page on the Taylor Two gift ship website.

 

Being environmentally conscious is very important to me, as I have a strong belief that mother nature operates best when least tampered with, indeed I think we're all (hopefully) beginning to see that the more we tamper, the more issues we tend to create. Nature is also beautiful, however we should treasure it not only for it's beauty, but because it literally keeps us alive, I'm not sure enough people fully appreciate that we directly rely on nature for our very existance.

 

For that reason I ensure that all packaging for products purchased in the Taylor Two gift shop are as environmentally friendly as they can be and that the three R's of Recycle, Reuse, Reduce are in mind at all times. Indeed not only does the packaging have sustainability at it's heart, many of the products do also; you will find beach glass jewellery in store for instance, and many jewellery pieces are made using copper; the third most recycled metal.

 

But enough about the shop, this is all about the produce from the mini allotment I have here! I've been growing my own vegetables for years but as a long term plan to become more sustainable with the ultimate aim of going fully off grid, I've upped the ante as it were.

 

This year I made far more room in my surburban garden for planting zones and planted a far wider range of vegetables than ever before. This year I planted tomatoes, broad beans, two types of onions, garlic, lettuce, spinach and more.

 

Today I was harvesting the tomatoes, shown in the photo below. They've grown huge! I think I bought a different variety from previous years and I like how big they are, I'll buy these seeds again. I believe previously I've bought cherry tomatoes. Now these have not ripened to red and as it's getting to Autumn I decided it was best to harvest them and ripen them indoors, which is yes something you can do.

 

The reason my tomatoes haven't ripened to red is firstly because this seedling batch were planted out a bit later than they should have been as my first batch suffered death at the hands of me being too heavy handed with the nitrates fertilisation (only natural nitrates of course, I don't like to use commercial fertilisers).

Frank N Furter Mug

 

Ripening Tomatoes Indoors

There are a few methods of ripening indoors and I've opted for the 'stick them in a jar with a banana or an apple' method. I didn't have a banana to hand so used an apple.

 

I had a choice of a red or green apple, and my no doubt flawed logic told me that if I want my tomatoes red, that surely the red apple is the best choice, and so in went the red.

 

I'm using the jar my sister bought me for my birthday this year, filling it with tomatoes instead of vodka cocktails. They've been in there three days now, not even a whiff of yellow let alone red ... I'll give it a week before I start researching "What can you do with green tomatoes".