Well, it’s all over. The last of our tomatoes picked and the plants consigned to the compost heap.
Its been relatively productive, 32 different varieties (many of them new to us) and over 45kg of fruit (I say over because I didn’t weigh all of the harvest and towards the end of the season, I wasn’t very rigorous about picking them before they split).
There was a mixture of colours, sizes, flavours and uses, from tiny yellow to large red. As ever, my favourite was summer cider, with its deep flavours and wonderful colours. The single plant produced over 5kg of fruit – highly productive by weight if not quantity.
Kibits Ukranian was extremely productive as well and I grew it in pots suspended from the framework of the polytunnel, letting me grow other crops in the borders so that was a successful experiment.
I continued to grow on my “Oleron Yellow”, they seem to be quite stable. I no longer protect the flowers on the fruit from which I’m going to collect seed but they continue to “run true”. Its five years now that I’ve been growing them so I’m really pleased.
I don’t think there was a cultivar that disappointed (I’ll go through in detail on the webpages) this makes selecting the cultivars to grow each year progressively more difficult. My seedbox is over 120 different cultivars which means if I just grow different varieties every year (and don’t add to the number) it’ll take me four years before I repeat. I presume that eventually the seeds will start losing viability but I can’t do anything about that.
Now I have to sit down and work out what to grow which competes for time with bringing the website back up to speed. I can do around five pages a day so that means it will be several weeks before its back to where it was.