Tomatoes

We have fruit trees and raspberry canes in our little suburban garden. But never have I grown anything that actually needed tending.

This year however, in line with frugality and old fashioned virtues, I decided to become a distinctly 17th century huswife type person (not a huswif as I first thought you will note…which is something quite different).

I have always moaned and whinged about not being able to buy proper continental lumpy tomatoes here in the UK, all tomatoes here are bland, monotonous and watery. I want to have thick walled deeply flavoured tomatoes,suitable for making salads or rubbing on garlicky toast for bruschetti. So the answer was that these should be my things to grow.

I bought my seeds on eBay from Ladybird Gardens, a small nursery seller – I like to buy from independent sellers where I can for things like this, I buy too many things from Sainsbury’s just for convenience, so the more unusual things can be from the independent sector to help keep the biodiversity of shopping alive.

It was quite unnerving, we didn’t have a nice spring so it seemed later and later until I could get them out into their pots and grow bags. I swapped some seeds with Linda at With Knife and Fork for a couple of cherry tomato plants that she was able to spare, just to add a bit of variety.

And they grew!

So I have watered, tied up, carefully disbudded, trimmed leaves so they wouldn’t get too musty, picked off the slugs, watered again, fed and generally worried about my tomatoey babies. And now is the time to reap my little harvest..

Yumyumyum