I promise this is the final instalment in my vegetable trilogy: vine-ripened tomatoes. And these were supermarket grown, although I’m hoping we’ll still have some ripening in the greenhouse into next month.
Tomatoes
Tag: Tomato
Best of the Bunch
The Alicante is supposed to be flamenco dancing. It’s difficult to get a tomato to look convincingly as if its flamenco dancing. I decided to limit the props for each variety to footwear. Obviously Tigerella has got those tiger feet.
The greenhouse looks like a jungle that has been lashed by tropical storm but we’ve never had a better year for tomatoes. As I was drawing the bowl of our beef and small plum tomatoes, I tried to draw each as an individual character. The calyx – the little crown of bracts – on each tomato was rather like a top-knot, which got me thinking about making them into cartoon characters.
Green Tomatoes
It was raining yesterday afternoon, so I sheltered in the greenhouse to draw, positioning myself to avoid most of the drips.
Our beef and plum tomatoes are slow to ripen but the last three months of the meteorological summer have been well below average for hours of sunshine, so that’s not surprising. Rather than grow them in buckets of potting compost as we normally do, we’ve got them growing directly in the soil of the raised bed in the greenhouse, which I refreshed by swopping bucketfuls of soil from our veg beds and adding plenty of our garden compost.
It’s like a jungle in there. The plants are much lusher than they would have been in pots, but we need to strip off some of the leaves now to allow the light and air in to ripen the fruits.
Back Garden Backlog
We’ve got an impressive crop of leeks but some are going to seed and there’s mildew on the leaves. Time to make some soup and bag some ready-prepared in the freezer.
The back lawn is more moss than grass down by the pond and the pond itself has been in need of clearing of duckweed since the summer.
Come to think of it, every bit of the garden needs a clear-out for the winter, including the greenhouse, where a few ripe tomatoes still hang on the vines.
The big black and white tomcat swaggers through the meadow. A new addition to his territory is a bonfire night rocket. Not quite as impressive as landing a probe on a comet.
Welsh Poppy
Mid-November and there’s still a lot in flower and a lot of spring flowering shrubs and flowers appearing early.
Most poppies have seedheads that resemble pepper pots; the Welsh poppy has slots. They remind me of Gaudi’s cathedral towers.