Tomato...

It’s British Tomato Week and time to celebrate the British tomato whether it be Cherry, Standard, Beefsteak, or plum. Quite what a British tomato is I have no idea, but we’ve been growing them here since the late 1500’s although tomatoes originated high in the Andes spreading out across the world when the Spanish arrived to steal the Inca gold.

Tomatoes are the only edible member of the deadly nightshade family and for many years were considered to be poisonous. As a child I hated them. Back then it seemed that if you quartered a tomato, threw it into a bowl with some limp lettuce and a couple of bits of soggy cucumber then you had a salad. My grandmother would always serve one up when we visited with slightly warm hard boiled eggs. It put me off salads for years.

Oddly I never connected tomatoes with soup, sauces, pizza topping, even ketchup, until I was in my teens; my early experience with the dreaded salad tomato making me blind to the beauty and flexibility of the fruit. These days I don’t know what I’d do without them. I’ve even learnt to like them raw sprinkled with salt, although not the sugar that my grandfather used to sprinkle on his.

This year I’m growing two varieties: Tumblers in baskets and Tigerella in pots and upside down planters both outside and in the greenhouse. The upside down planters are an experiment and I’m interested to see how the plants form and the resulting fruits.

The Tumblers are going to be small and sweet, ideal roasted or served in an oil dressing with mint and parsley, and the Tigerella are great for cooking with and making sauces. Tigerella tomatoes, as the name suggests, are striped yellow and red. I grew 27 plants from a packet containing 25 seeds I bought at the pound shop so I’m sure that we are going to be making a lot of chutney this year.

I’m also really keen to try a fried green tomato recipe I stumbled across. I’ll let you know how that goes when I try my first home grown green tomatoes of the season.