It has been a long, slow and mostly pretty cool summer in the greenhouse. Social media loves to throw old triumphs from past years at us, and so I am fully aware of how smug I have been about summer tomatoes in other years, and how pitifully late my tomatoes are this year. It feels like months ago when I first started to get facebook ‘reminders’ of my hands holding huge, bulbous, deep red fruits, triumphant against the summer garden. Peering into the greenhouse I could see this year’s plants …growing, sure, flowering even, but far from producing any actual fruit that I could slice up for summer meals in the garden.
Well now it is September and they are finally here. Kind of. I grow almost exclusively beefsteak tomatoes because I love them and I think the ones that you grow are unlike anything you can buy in the UK, plus I can fantasise that they are like the ones you can buy around the Mediterranean. Not this year perhaps. Mine are absolutely tiny for beefsteaks. Delicious, yes, but tiny. I like to take fat slices and lay them on a plate and drizzle them with olive oil and sprinkle them with sea salt, and I don’t think this is really going to happen. So what went wrong? I’m tracing it right back to the start of the year when the spring was so cold and wet that few thoughts of gardening even entered my head. Every now and then I would be vaguely aware that time was ticking on, but the urge just wasn’t there. This I will learn from: if you don’t start early in the greenhouse you almost needn’t bother, because plants like tomatoes – even more so peppers and aubergines – really need a very long, warm season in order to grow, flower, fruit and ripen. Our greenhouses help to fool them that this is a country that gets those conditions, that is suitable for them to do all that in – but not if we don’t actually plant them nice and early so that they get that time. The size of them may be down to the cool summer but I’m guessing that I have to take some of the blame here too – user error? Perhaps they didn’t get enough water and feed as they were swelling, but the low temperatures won’t have helped.
My best tomato years have been when I have ordered grafted mini vegetable plants early on in the season. Grafting means taking the rootstock of a very vigorous tomato, slicing off the top ‘plant’ part, and splicing a named and flavourful variety onto the roots. The two mesh and become one plant, and the named variety produces its tasty tomatoes, but with the boost of a rocket powered rootstock. It works really well. You also can only get them if you order ahead, which means that they are delivered at the right time for planting out. No waiting for the urge to strike, or holding off for the right weather – which rarely comes in spring – the plants are there and you have to look after them. Along with their inherent qualities they kick the season off good and early and force the gardener not to be tardy – something I could clearly do with.
In the meantime I will enjoy my tiny and delicious harvest, perhaps not sliced and drizzled Mediterranean style, perhaps not even mashed up and spread on garlicky toasted bread for pan con tomate. Each one is a little too precious for any of that, but they will be enjoyed all the more for it.