Tomatoes With A Love Injection

12 heart-shaped baby tomatoes (there is a variety called Baby Heart or else, like me, you get lucky with a seed cross. Of course, any cherry toms will do)
A pinch of well ground celery or lovage seed salt
Squeeze of lemon
A dessert spoon of Worcestershire Sauce (or to taste)
A teaspoon of Tabasco (or to taste)
8 fluid oz of good-quality vodka
One or two drips of Port

The fiddly bit
Using the empty syringe (you will need the largest possible diameter needle from your friendly chemist) carefully remove as much natural juice as possible entering the tomato through the green head, you will need to wiggle it about carefully without opening a hole. Allow the ingredients to mix and mingle for ten minutes then filter through muslin, any particles will block the needle, so take time over this. Fill the syringe with the mix, tapping it a couple of times with your nail if you want to look nursey (and don't we all!), and inject through the same top hole being careful to not overfill or the tomatoes will split with the pressure. Chill. Warn everyone to close their mouths around the little tom bombs, as they are quite explosive so serve with napkins!

Gardening Un-coordinated (A love Letter)

I was so surprised and delighted, when, after all the years of self-sufficiency-dreaming on my behalf, Nick took to gardening when the opportunity presented itself. He had his own style, of course, totally juxtaposed to mine, which, as always, is to be expected. Nevertheless, he embraced it as a new and pleasurable pastime, which could be enjoyed outside, basking in his beloved sun-stoke-inducing weather and rewarded with an ice cooled gin and tonic as the sun hit the yardarm. Weeding was out, (well, how convenient!) nature was all. And, of course, there was the idea of maybe being able to grow a drink or two!

He also re-found a childhood mania for digging holes. Not just any little ten or twelve inch planting holes, but serious here-comes-Australia holes! (Yesterday, a house painter came to size up our windows for a quote and asked me how we grew bamboo as thick and tall as we do. I had to describe the hole Nick dug for the root ball. I don’t think he believed me!) Anyway, what ever turned him on was OK by me, as long as we could do it side by side. (With constant know-it-all comments from both parties.) When he suffered his back injury he was amused to find himself telling the physiotherapist that amongst his ‘hobbies’ was gardening. It took him by surprise, which was more than a little ironic, as that’s what brought him there in the first place.
Well, the truth is, despite the endless banter of ‘my way is the only way’ that we both indulge in, I miss him along side me. In fact, I’ll go as far as saying gardening is a duel process for me; it’s the interplay that keeps me interested and feisty. To get to the nub of the blog and problem, suddenly I’m on my tod and I hate it. Yesterday, I spent four hours slogging at the allotment planting beans, erecting poles and ploughing through general maintenance, which would have seemed like half an hour in his company.
Here is a quick roundup of the varieties of bean and tomato I’m growing this year, with an apology that I’m not blogging as much as I would like due to fact that I’m flying solo so far this growing season. Hope he’s on the mend soon and comes out the other side still retaining his enthusiasm for the task in hand, albeit in our separate camps! Love you, miss you!

Beans
Fagioli Rampicanti (Yard Long Beans)
Fagioli Nani (Cannellino Bush Beans)
Borlotto Rosso (Dwarf Beans)
Borlotto Centofiamme (Climber: the Mystery Bean see previous post)
Triofo Violtto (Climbing Purple French Bean)
My own breed of runner beans (a show stopper)


Tomatoes
Orange Queen
Green Zebra
Russian Prune Noir
Noire De Crimee
Des Andes
Anna Russian
Purple Calabash
Ananas
Ox Heart
Costoluto Fiorentino

Winter Blues, Reds and Greens

As winter bites, it's a good time to remember last years fruits and plan for more and better next year. In September 2006 I visited Château de la Bourdaisière in the Loire for the annual Tomato Festival and come away tomato star struck with a great variety of heirloom seeds. All that winter I waited patiently for 1st April to begin to germinate the bounty. Every seed became a seedling so that by May I was giving pots of baby tomatoes to anyone who had a garden, window box or old shoe to grow them in. In the end I freecycled the last to grateful strangers. Wow and how they grew. By the end of the season I had picked over a hundred kilos. Salads, sauces, bottles, jams, pickles, ketchup you name it, we processed it. So here in memory of great harvest are some photographs. My favorite was an orange beef heart-type with a very thin skin, which tasted more like tomato than any tomato I ever ate. There were green stripped zebra types more acid and great for mixed salad de tomato. Black tomatoes from Russia rich and honey sweet. Yellow plum types to make surprisingly smooth and golden pasta sauces. Pointy ones, banana-shaped ones, tiny ones, the choice is yours. So if you fancy having a go, my advice is to look at www.kokopelli-seed-foundation.com to supply your every need, I assume they ship to the UK, or get on down to the Festival of everything Tomato, who needs an excuse to visit the Loire anyway?