Tomatoes!

So last week i harvested the first crop of fruit from the tomato plants that i grew from seed this year:



The varieties of tomato i grew were "unregistered" varieties, which means that it's actually illegal to sell them in the EU, simply because they are not on the official EU plant variety register (which of course costs money to put a variety on). In protest against this law, which effectively gives the EU a monopoly over food plant biodiversity, and to preserve such varieties (which are almost always better tasting and more nutritious than "mainstream" fruit and veg varieties), various organisations such as organic gardening centres in the UK (and, i presume, other places in the EU) offer ways to get round the ban, such as "seed exchange" events where seeds are swapped for other seeds or given away free, or membership clubs in which people can pay a yearly membership fee and be able to get X number of seed packets a year "free" (a very similar tactic to that used by legally rented social centres to get round alcohol licensing costs by being "private members' clubs").

I believe it's also possible to get hold of unregistered seed varieties by ordering them from outside the EU (there are quite a few US-based seed catalogue websites which offer payment in UK£ and stock loads of unusual varieties of stuff). Most unregistered varieties are heirloom varieties.

I got these ones from a seed exchange at a weekend of events in Nottingham called "Spring Into Action" (organised by the East Midlands neighbourhood of the Camp for Climate Action) - i believe the seeds originated from Ryton Organic Gardens near Coventry (formerly HDRA... yeah, i love the linguistic resonance with hydra)...

The red ones in the above picture are a variety called "Darby Striped", which actually looked more striped when they were green:



(pic of Darby Striped tomato plant about a month ago)

The pale yellow ones are a variety called "Ivory Egg", which didn't have a description on the packet when i picked them (i actually picked them because of the unusualness of the name). As you can see, they somewhat live up to the name (although again, there are some green ones still on the plant that look more unusual)...



(again taken about a month ago; some of the ones still on the plant and not ripened yet are now quite a lot bigger than the ones in the top photo)

I also grew a couple of plants of a beefsteak variety called "Yellow Brandywine", but those haven't produced much fruit (i think the flowers might have had pollination problems)... in the photos further down of the plants, those are the ones with the "potato-like" leaves.

These tomatoes are from plants that were grown in a polytunnel on a friend's allotment. I also had 6 plants in pots at home, which grew much taller and much bigger leaves than the ones in the polytunnel, but their fruits haven't ripened. As it's now getting too cold for tomatoes to ripen on the plant, i've taken quite a few of the green ones off and put them in bowls on my windowsill with some (bought) ripe tomatoes and bananas (which apparently encourage green tomatoes to ripen):



The process of indoor ripening is supposed to take about 2 weeks, but as you can see a couple of the tomatoes in the window have turned red already, although the rest of them show no indication of changing colour as yet...

I seem to have the same problem every time i try to grow tomatoes - plants which grow huge and very healthy-looking, but take a very long time to flower and fruit, and don't manage to produce much ripe fruit before the weather gets too cold for them. (I think it was made worse this year by the incredibly wet and cloudy summer.)

Here are the plants in my garden, at their healthiest looking:





(at the time those pics were taken, the tallest plant was about 5'6", including the height of the pot - 3 of them ended up reaching over 6')

The ones in the polytunnel, which didn't grow as big (4' approx), but produced bigger fruit:



Some photos of the tomato plants at earlier stages in their development:



Seedlings a couple of days after germination (leek seedlings and part of the leaf of a runner bean plant can also be seen). I germinated about 50 tomato plants, and gave away all but 15 after potting up into the first pots (although i was kind of dismayed to visit one friend i had given some to a couple of months later, when my plants were in 12" pots and had started flowering, to find hers still in the soup/yoghurt pots i first put them in, with no chance of getting flowers or fruit out of them).



One seedling which had 3 "seed leaves" instead of 2. Sadly it didn't grow into a new, 50%-more-productive mutant breed of "threemato" (its mature leaf arrangement was normal; i think it ended up in the polytunnel) ;)



The same plant a couple of weeks later, at the "yoghurt pot" stage

If i grow tomatoes next year, i think i'll have to a) sow the seeds earlier on (March maybe rather than April) and b) pot them up into small pots as soon as they reach the 2-leaf stage, rather than waiting for them to grow in the seed tray (as they just "sat there" in the seed tray at the 2-leaf stage for about a month before i potted them up, then almost immediately started growing). Maybe they inherited some of my executive dysfunction ;)

I've always felt a real connection with plants (i possibly blame Alan Moore's Swamp Thing); growing them from seed to fruit is a real buzz, and the allotment project i'm involved with is probably among the most positive things currently in my life... yeah, i'm a hippy ;)

(The plants have also given me an opportunity to practice my photography...)

Random crazy tomato factoids:

- Tomatoes were once believed to be poisonous, and to be the "apple" from the Garden of Eden.

- According to Wikipedia, the world's biggest tomato tree has a harvest of more than 32,000 tomatoes and a total weight of 1,151.84 pounds :o (Presumably this is a perennial tomato variety, which could have really interesting implications for permaculture...)

- The Soviet regime in Russia (partly influenced by their... unorthodox, ideology-"informed" approach to the theory of evolution) experimented with trying to grow varieties of plant crops that would resist very cold climates. A result of this was the Russian black tomato varieties, one of which was named after Paul Robeson, who was regarded as a hero by the Soviet regime (if they really are cold-resistant, maybe i should try to get hold of some of those for next year...)