I'm harvesting tomatoes

It's tomato time!

During August we have had good growing weather - a mix of warm sunshine and heavy rain. Vegetable plants generally need lots of water if they are to do well, so it is important to keep on top of watering. It seems like a chore when we do it, but the garden will repay our efforts handsomely. In hot weather it is particularly important to ensure that plants in pots and containers (like my tomatoes) do not dry out. Their roots of course cannot just go deeper in search of moisture as plants in open soil can.

My self-watering tomato pots have been a Godsend. The plants in them are by far the biggest in my collection - "Orkado" and "Ferline" - and they would have suffered badly wthout copious quantities of water. This is Orkado, laden with fruit:

It's a toss-up whether Ferline or Orkado will produce the biggest yield. Orkado has more fruits, and fairly even-sized ones too, whereas Ferline has a smaller number, but some very big ones.

Left: "Ferline", right: "Orkado"

A point to note is that sometimes the advent of heavy rain (or an overdose of water applied with a watering-can) after a prolonged period of dry, hot weather can sometimes cause the ripening fruit to split. This is caused by the flesh expanding more rapidly than the skin. This is not the same as cracking, which is something that happens gradually. Splitting occurs quickly.

This is a cracked tomato:

"Russian Black", cracking

And these are splitting tomatoes:

"Black Cherry" splitting after heavy rain - photo from 2010

When splitting seems likely I often pick any fruit that are nearly ripe, and bring them indoors to ripen on a sunny windowsll. Very unripe tomatoes are seldom affected.

As evidenced by the photos in this post, I am already harvesting a lot of ripe tomatoes. I love to have a variety of different types for making salads with. When you are cooking tomatoes for sauce or passata you want them all the same if possible, but salads need different textures and colours! Like this, for instance:

In the salad in the picture above, apart from tomatoes (6 different types), there is lettuce, thinly-sliced shallots, and parsley - all home-grown of course. I added a sprinkling of red wine vinegar just before
serving.

Clockwise, from the top: Red Pear, Cherokee Purple, Sungold, Maskotka, Sungella, Orkado, and in the centre Tigerella.

Some of the big Cherokee Purple tomatoes got made into a tomato tart, with puff pastry, pesto and Parmesan.  Super-yummy!

Even "San Marzano" has finally deigned to produce some fruit. I thought it wasn't going to, but on close inspection I find that there are indeed a few fruits lurking in the undergrowth:



This year I have grown several more unusual types of tomato. Like this "Red Pear" for instance. It is one from the Franchi Seeds collection [ Seeds of Italy ].

Actually, that is not a classic example of the Red Pear. It is much flatter than it should be. It ought to be more, well, pear-shaped!

This year, for some reason, lots of the tomatoes - even the normally very uniform "Maskotka" - have produced some abberations, like these:

Well, thay may look odd, but they still taste nice.... :)