Feed your Tomatoes with Aspirin to prevent Blight and improve flavour?

There's no end to my talents @pete ...

Only used the crystals once (last year when FC and @Sheal were using nappies for their hanging baskets) and I must have put too many crystals in because once I added the water, the contents of the hanging baskets grew, and grew, and grew and spread over the edges of it

 

I've found most tomatoes will squirt sufficient juice directley onto the refactometer to get a reading, it only takes a tiny amount to get a reading, but some beefsteaks may be so fleshy that's not possible, so what I do with fruits/veg like that is mash F g of whole fruit with W ml of water (don't over dilute), leave 24 hours for it to release all the fruit sugars, stirring occasionaly, strain, then take a reading.

Calculate using J, weight of juice =Fg x 0.85 (I assume 15:85 juice:solids by weight, if you want to be very precise dry out the strained material, let it dry and weigh it) plus the weight of W = L, the total liquid weight of juice and water. The Brix adjustment is therefore L/J, example:

250g of whole tomato in 500 ml of water, weight of juice = 250g x 0.85 = 213g of juice, plus 500g of water =713g of liquid and an adustment of 713/213 = 3.35, so if the Brix reading from the diluted juice was 2, then the adjusted reading for pure juice would be 2 x 3.35 = 6.7

 

I forgot to mention the 'freeze/thaw' method of juice extraction which I regularly use for winemaking, but have never tried it with tomatoes (as I don't make tomato wine) although it should work.

Put a segment of tomato in a small plastic bag and place in a freezer for 24 hours, don't use fast freeze as the intention is to rupture the cell walls so juice will be released when defrosting.

Now you have a refractometer all sorts of stuff can be easily checked for sugar content, enabling you to work out just how unhealthy loads of the fresh fruit and veg you grow are, especially if you convert your Brix readings to teaspoons of sugar per 100g of produce (6 Brix for juice = 1 x 5g teaspoon of sugar per 100g of whole fruit/veg). Then calculate just how few apples (or even tomatoes!) you need to eat in order to consume the amount of sugar in a Mars Bar, or one of the unhealthy 'high sugar' drinks the Government want to tax.

 

@"M" perhaps I should have mentioned I mixed mine in a wheelbarrow before filling the baskets and it's amazing how it expanded when I added water!

 

A guy on my allotment swears by putting willow in his compost bin - guess for the asprin ! Very interesting !