Czutni chutzpah...

I grew up in a family where tomatoes were a staple over the summer. I have vague memories of my mum selling them to people in brown paper bags, price unknown, and I think this has influenced my growing habits in later life.

After last year’s disastrous harvest of exactly no tomatoes, this year has proved to be a much better deal. Having put up a greenhouse on the allotment and transferred plants there early on, the results have been much better than I expected and we still have fruit in the yard just beginning to ripen. One truss has thirty fruits on it, but the worry is the summer will end (ha, did it ever start?) before they’re ripe.
Above, some of the many plum tomatoes, variety San Marzano
And the ordinary variety, Shirley. The Polish ones, Kmicic, are still green although a couple have now started to turn and will be red before too long.

So what to do with the masses of tomatoes? Well, some have been traded for eggs from local chickens (Thanks Henrietta) and the rest have been eaten in take-to-work salads, made into tomato sauce for pasta, using home grown onions and garlic, and then frozen, or boiled up with more onions, dates, sugar and vinegar to make chutney. Now we have to wait six weeks before testing, so I hope it's ok. We'll see.