At last our tomatoes are ripening! So today for lunch we are having a freshly picked assortment, seasoned with Majorcan black olive salt, which was a gift from some of our visitors over the break.
It’s well into Summer and about time we had heirloom tomatoes ready to pick. The biggest lesson I’ve learnt this year about growing tomatoes here is to get them in much, much earlier. We only had a couple of nights in July when the temperature dropped toward freezing, and sowing seeds in August in the shade house would have meant they would have been up and going through the dry, sunny and warm October and November days. Mind you, I didn’t have the shade house set up back then.
Anyway, the outcome of the late sowing was a tantalising wait across Christmas as plenty of green fruit set and sat. Then we had two weeks of heavily overcast rainy weather which didn’t speed things along. But now after a few days of sunshine the tomatoes are finally ripening.
The varieties I sowed (from Eden Seeds) were:
Thai pink egg,
Burnley bounty,
Black russian,
Green zebra,
and Mayan indian.
Also there are several plants around that have volunteered (from accidentally or animal-scattered seed) which include a nice little cherry tomato, and a larger-than-cherry tomato, both of which have become substantial bushes.
My favourite so far is the Thai Pink Egg, because of its lovely colour and shape. The Mayan Indian is also a good orange colour and producing well. There are a couple I’m not sure about, without checking back in my records of what went where, but there’s a beefsteak type that seems to be a green variety, and no sign of black tomatoes yet.
The reasoning behind this selection was to get a good range of sizes and colours to make eye-catching salads, and maybe add variety to a hoped-for long season.
Also I hope to get a range of flavours; we tend to just talk about whether a tomato is sweet and delicious or not, and here in the shops we tend to have the choice of standard, roma, or gourmet cherry tomatoes, but I’m sure there’s a bit of flavour matching to explore when you know the range of your home-grown fruit.