The gloriousness of tomatoes

Can there be any better glut than a glut of tomatoes? To be fair, I'm pretty keen on any glut at all and am currently enjoying drowning in enormous autumn raspberries, but I've had a great tomato harvest this year, too. I grow some for looks and some for taste and some for abundance and I thought I'd share the positives and negatives from this year.

Variety is great, so you can end up with a very pretty salad and if a few of the odder colours don't taste super-fantastic it doesn't matter so much, especially once the best olive oil has worked its magic, maybe suffused with a bit of lime oil and black pepper. Above is the salad a friend in the Gardening Group - well done, Debbie! - made for another GG member, using bought tomatoes and some of my yellow, black and stripey ones. She'd bought some varied colours from a certain supermarket but they'd been really disappointing, so she'd asked if I had anything to spare. I always have something to spare!

Love, love, love

And above is a day's pickings from back in early August.

The ones I won't be growing again are some large heritage varieties, Bloody Butcher and Marmande. Ugly brutes but also soft, woody, prone to rotting, and utterly tasteless. I can't stand a mushy tomato! I also won't grow Tumbling Rom red or yellow, cherry varieties which tasted really dull. Friends I gave seedlings to said the same so it wasn't just something I did.

Marmande - horrible - and these were far from the ugliest examples

One tasteless one which I didn't regret because of its prettiness is "indigo blue" - no idea why it's called blue, as it's brown and red... It's a prolific cordon cherry variety. But next year I'll replace it with Sunchocolate, which has done well before.

Indigo blue

Indigo blue before ripening

One of my favourites, with good flavour and great taste was Shimmer, a red/green stripey drop-shaped variety which worked as well outside as in the greenhouse.

Sungold are brilliantly reliable and I'll grow them every year until I drop. Shirley and Sweet Million are also sure-fire winners.  But next year, I'll omit the big heritage ones and add in Sunlemon for the yellow and a Moneymaker red. 

Let me just leave you with a sun-blissed memory of summer: