End of the line for the Cherry Tomatoes

This year has been a very good one for tomatoes. The hot weather, combined with the absence of blight, has helped me to achieve a bumper harvest - probably my best ever.

However, all good things come to an end some time, and today I judged that the "Maskotka" and "Montello" cherry tomato plants (which between them produced over 18kgs of fruit) had reached the end of their useful lives. To be honest, to the unpractised eye they would have looked dead already!

Taking down tomato plants and emptying their pots is a job best done in good weather. Doing it when the weather has turned cold and wet is utterly miserable, so I wanted to complete this task before we get to that stage, even though there were still a few fruits on them that might have ripened. To be exact, I managed to rescue another 575g, although most of them are pretty green.

Actually, I didn't cut down ALL of the plants. One of the "Maskotka" plants got a reprieve, because it still had a significant number of fruit left on it. I moved it into the back garden, to the tall wooden planter where its siblings had formerly lived.

Here's a closer look. Some of those fruit might well ripen.

By the way, did you notice the flower sticking out of that pot? It's a "volunteer" Sunflower - probably something that has dropped out of the bird-feeder. It's very tiny by Sunflower standards, but quite pretty nonetheless.

While the weather is nice, I'm off up to the Courtmoor Avenue plot now, to see if anything up there needs doing too...