Picking tomatoes

Picking your own tomatoes is very satisfying. Fully mature tomatoes is a sign of a healthy plant often despite weather conditions and the limiting factors of a small city garden. When the tomatoes are heirloom varieties the whole exercise is one of helping to preserve a rare breed. All the seeds from these plants can be used to produce next year’s tomatoes.

The heatwave earlier in the year, when the tomatoes were just starting, gave the plants a good boost. Both the plants in the raised bed and the pots have all produced ripe fruit. All of these plants had some overhead protection from the recent heavy rain and none are showing signs of late blight (yet). It has been another good year for growing tomatoes outdoors.

Four of the best producers for a small garden or balcony are Moneymaker, Yellow Perfection, Harbinger and Golden Sunrise. These plants produce golfball sized fruits in small bunches of a half dozen. Each plant will produce about a dozen bunches of fruit over several weeks. These tomatoes are firm and sweet with distinctive fresh flavours.

One way of using up the current over-supply of tomatoes is to dry them. A simple, inexpensive electric dehydrator does the job well. This allows a large volume of produce to be stored in a small space. The dried tomatoes can be easily rehydrated later and used in sauces etc, maintaining their unique flavours.

Besides the golfball sized fruits, it is worth having a few plants with the larger paste type tomatoes. These are picked and used on a daily basis with some also dried for later. Even though the weather has not been ideal the last few weeks it is safe to say most green tomatoes will now ripen. If the sun comes out for another week this year will turn out to be a fine tomato growing year.

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