Today I decided that the tomatoes were starting to get ripe enough to warrant picking a few. As usual the cherry tomatoes are the first with Oleron Yellow, Red Berry, Garnet, Koralik Red Cherry & Indigo Cherry Drops making up the majority of fruit by number. However, the weight was mainly from standard red tomatoes with Balconi Red, Bloody Butcher and Sandpoint providing the weight.
It was a total of 1.3kg which doesn’t sound a lot but in a couple of days, I expect there will be a similar quantity.
As usual, one of the things is to collect seed from the open pollinated and heritage varieties to give me seeds to grow in future years. It was that aspect that got me interested in the first place. Whilst I didn’t want to get into breeding tomatoes, maintaining the varieties was something that I thought was important. Over the years, I’ve selected my favourites and continued to save seed and grow from my own seed.
The difficulty is knowing what to do with all the tomatoes, we eat, freeze, make sauces and chutneys but in a good year we still have too much.