This weekend I cleared the tomato plants from the greenhouse and brought the last fruit indoors to ripen or cook as green tomatoes. The cherry tomatoes were my 2025 saved seed from over-ripe supermarket organic fruit, the others were my husband's choice of Moneymaker and Alicante, their packets opened in 2025 and partly used.
It was a challenge to grow tomatoes from start to finish. Cultivating glasshouse tomatoes has been one of my husband's passions since he was fifteen so I never used to intervene. I took instructions on visits to the ward, begged compost, a seed tray and propagator cover from a neighbour and positioned them on the front windowsill above the radiator where they usually sit.
They germinated. I probably sowed them too thickly. I pricked them out and grew them on. When they were large enough, as we customarily do, I donated some to my knitting buddies.
I asked a neighbour's gardener to prep up the beds in the greenhouse with a mix of our own compost and shop compost and planted them out at what seemed to be the right spacings.
When my husband came home we managed to plant up our salad crib on the back patio with the remainder. It was cold and I had to improvise protection with various plastic sheets. They looked very woeful for the first few weeks but during the dry weather they recovered. These crazy plants are still flowering up against the wall, but I shall have to take them up too.
I did not sideshoot the greenhouse tomatoes to my husband's ideal standard, but I had the fancy that they would look prettier bushing out rather than drastically curtailed. I learned to rectify this. We did not get as large a harvest, but had sufficient for our own needs and to give away. I will not let tomatoes run away with themselves again.
And so to the first week in November when they finally came out. I looked at the empty beds which I would have filled with winter salad or beet spinach in seasons past. This autumn I have left the greenhouse fallow.
It is a long time to March next year and none of us can see the future. But, even though the experts do not recommend it, I have saved some more supermarket organic tomatoes.
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