bringing in the tomatoes

Another job I should have done weeks ago beckoned today. The greenhouse is still full of tomato plants, and I can see from my bedroom window that there are fruit on them and some of the fruit is ripe. I planted a lot of different varieties this year, but they all did badly. This is down to three things:

• I didn't plant them out into their grow-bags until quite late, because we kept having terrifying plunging frosts
• Keeping up with the watering was very challenging this year 
• The neighbour's colossal willow tree and our passion vine had a competition to see which of them could shade the greenhouse most effectively (spoiler: the tomatoes lost)

For interest, my varieties were Pink Oxheart (which are actually pink and heart shaped!), Golden Pear (yes, pear shaped and yellow), Purple Apache and Green Opal (oval shaped and green), and one of the fancy big italian beefsteaks, I forget which. 

You can take it as read that they all tasted good - garden tomatoes do - but nothing tasted amazing this year. The need to go heavy on watering in the morning diluted the juice and the plants drying out at three hours before I was due back from work tightened the skin and sacrificed the fruit bottom to blossom end rot. There were some additional issues too, which means bar the apaches, I probably won't revisit any of these varieties:

• The Green Opals are a pain in the arse, as you really can't tell when they're ripe at all - it's harder even than the green zebras. 
• The Pink Oxhearts are slow to ripen and few on the vine. I planted them very early, and it still wasn't early enough.
• The Golden Pears are insanely prolific flowerers but a lot of the buds don't set fruit and a lot of these fruits stay very small - they're really a tomato berry. They're also really sprawly.
• The Purple Apaches are one of the best tasting tomatoes there is, but they can struggle in crowded and overshadowed conditions, and they did.
• The Costolutos (I think it was they) were picky about their watering so I got mostly three-quarters of a fruit with the blossom end rot going into the compost 

But there were still a lot of fruit! Even after I'd picked out the bad and the burst and the rotty, there were still a few kilos of tomatoes, mostly green, to stack up on the kitchen windowsill.