tomatoes

13 Aug 2009

They were so full of promise

After a week of fluctuating weather – some days glorious, some positively autumnal, some days had a bit of both, I finally had what looked like edible tomatoes.

They had been fully formed and green for some time, but it has taken perhaps 3 week for them to actually turn red – at first there was a patchy flush of peach colouring, it deepened to an all-over orange and finally this week, they actually looked like proper tomatoes. At least a few of them do – I still have about 40 green specimens, at this rate, they’ll end up in chutney.

My husband has monitored them like a kid waiting for a cake to rise, wide eyed and salivating. He loves a flavoursome tomato and loves the smell of them, commenting on the fragrance everytime he brushed past the plants.

I think we’ll have to be satisfied with enjoying them this way – as a visual creation. Please click to see a larger copy.

Last night, he could contain himself no longer and went out and picked the 5 tomatoes shown – he called me down to witness them and ceremoniously grabbed our best serrated tomato-cutting knife and chopping board and sliced the juiciest example right down the middle, mercilessly splitting it asunder.

We stood in admiration at the perfectly formed centre and juicy fruitiness of something that came into being at our own hand. We steeled ourselves to savour the moment of glory and each mouthed a half. It’s true to say that the flavour was good. Very good. Just what you’d hope for from a home grown, loved and well tended specimen.

But it was mushy and soft and the texture was pretty unpleasant. I suspect the long period they took to ripen was not kind on the fruity flesh. I feel so sorry for him, he was so looking forward to eating them, I feel that he has been cheated and it was with a heavy heart as I put the breakfast things back in the fridge, I saw that the remaining four specimens were sitting there un-loved. They never even made it into his lunch box. What a cruel blow for him after all that anticipation.

23 Jul 2009

The biggest raspberry in the world . . .

. . . or the one that got away!

I’ve hardly had chance to get out into the garden this week – there has been torrential rain with a stiff breeze, punctuated by short – very short – spells of bright sunshine. No sooner to get I get my clogs on and head out of the door, than the heavens dump on me again.

But this afternoon I got a decent interval to catch up on some outdoor chores when it remained dry and the air was nice and warm.

As blogged previously, I have some raspberry canes which have done better at actually producing fruit this year than in recent years, largely due to the warm sunny spell we had a week or two ago – I think that was the summer of 2009 and is nothing but a distant memory now. So I had a few fruits to pick that I could see through the foliage. After the poor performance of my canes in recent summers, I planted two new pots of a different variety and the fruits they produce are fabulous – they’re huge, succulent, sweet and flavoursome.

One pot is in a slightly different position than the others and doesn’t seemingly get quite as much full sun and I didn’t help it by putting the least mature canes in that spot. Consequently, the fruit is somewhat behind the rest of my crop (I use this term very loosely, a handful a day hardly qualifies) and I haven’t yet picked any from that pot.

I haven’t grown sweet peas for years and these are my first blooms this year.
They’re such a vibrant colour that you would think it was man-made.

But the largest raspberry that was furthest on had reached absolute perfection today – it was perfectly ripe, flawless and absolutely mahoosive. This was perhaps the largest raspberry I’ve ever seen – absolutely gi-huge – certainly the largest I’ve grown by a significant margin. It was displaying itself proudly at the front of the bough, with a perfect bright green leaf either side of it and a cluster of smaller paler fruits behind. This needed to be recorded for posterity. Whilst my camera was to hand, the memory card was in the card reader upstairs.

This is not the raspberry in question, I took this a while ago to show the average size of the fruits these new canes produce. My fabulous specimen was at least twice this size.

So I returned a little while later with my card, grabbed the camera and headed outside to record this behemoth specimen of raspberry-dom. I actually did a physical double take. I took a few steps back and re-traced my steps, wondering if it had been on the other pot, not the one I was looking at. My prize raspberry was nowhere to be seen. All that remained was a shiny cream coloured hull and two or three pink drupelets of the fruit remaining.

Stop thief!

Someone had stolen my raspberry! I would have taken a photo of the crime scene, but I was too flabbergasted to think to at the time. I can only assume a bird has taken it, but there’s not really anywhere for a bird to perch whilst harvesting the booty and I rarely get birds in that garden because it is so enclosed within steep walls.

So now no one will believe how truly fabulous it was – but I swear – it was . . . . this . . . big!

Thankfully my tomatoes are still right where they should be.
But I shall be organising surveillance as they ripen.