Summertime Gardening (The Only Thing I Can Grow are Tomatoes)

17th June, 2025

A couple of years ago, I - a woman of few skills when it comes to the natural world - decided to start growing tomatoes. Well, actually, the thought had occurred to me, mostly as part of a larger campaign (at the time) to do something EXCELLENT and EXCITING with my life. I wanted to change things, and thought that growing a living thing from scratch (and then eating of its fruit) would be a good way to do that. It just so happened, then, that on my way to work one grey, blustery Saturday, I came across a vicar, stood outside the church rather than at its pulpit, hawking his wares. Not secondhand books, or Victoria sponges made by his parishoners, but baby tomato plants. (Things like this happen in Britain).

He sold me the plant for 50p (67 American cents, or 59 Euros), and I took it to work with me, placing it in the staff room and making sure nobody touched my new baby, on pain of me not talking to them and giving them dirty looks for destroying MY PLANT. Fortunately, nobody coveted my random, sad-looking, generally quite shitty bundle of leaves and soil, and thus it stayed unmolested in the staff room until it was time to go home. Once there, I planted it in some compost that I found in my dad's shed, in a pot far too small for it. The next day I went to the farm shop nearby and spent a pretty penny on glorious vestments for my new baby - chiefly, a pot of the correct size and some tomato fertiliser.

From there, my plant - whom I christened Tomatina, her being a female plant, which I knew because she produced flowers, the definition of a plant's sex which I would not have known were it not for Google - grew tremendously. Aided by the brandy-brown fertiliser, she blossomed beautifully and produced a great number of adorable cherry tomatoes, in a distinctive and tasty yellow hue. They melded nicely with the butter in my sandwiches. I ate well for weeks. She was gorgeous.

Unfortunately, the plant in this picture is not Tomatina.

Yeah, so - and I found this out after the fact, but - apparently tomatoes aren't very hardy when it comes to frost. The second that summer begins breathing its dying gasps, and the threat of autumn looms over the horizon and starts gilding the leaves, a tomato plant must be brought inside. A friend of mine who is a regular green-thumb and sees Alan Titchmarsh as a personal hero told me this when I asked her what was wrong with Tomatina, who had stopped producing fruit and looked, suddenly, very sad. Even sadder than when I'd relinquished her from the care of the vicar. Tomatina, she said, was dead. Gone-zo. She'd tomatoed her last.

Devastated, I sadly emptied Tomatina's pot, and resolved to try again.

And try again, I did! This time, I was going to do one better, to honour Tomatina's memory. I bought tomato seeds - and carrot seeds, thank you very much - and planted them in some small pots. I covered them with clingfilm, fashioned a spray bottle to drench them lightly. I kept them on the windowsill of a south-facing bedroom in my house and watched in wonder, delight, and childlike joy as the tiny green shoots came rising from the soil, the proverbial phoenix fluttering into life from the ashes of Tomatina.

And then I fucked up AGAIN because I got a girlfriend and we went on holiday to somewhere warm and tropical and went to the cinema and for dinner and for long walks in nature and for coffee and to the pub and I dragged her shopping in a half-dead mall and then it was around the time I was deciding which acid-washed mom jeans to buy that I remembered -

"Oh fuck."

"I wonder how those plants are doing."

"I forgot about them."

(Yeah. I killed the plants. Again.)

So I thought, fuck it! Third time's the charm. I was at a village fete the other day and saw somebody selling many plants for a pound each (An American dollar-thirty-four, or €1.17 of your European Euros - talk about inflation). The tomato plants looked at me menacingly. I looked back at them. The woman wrapped the plant in a page of the Daily Mail and handed it to me after I regaled her with my previous tale of woe, vis-à-vis my garden which is now a plant cemetary. She didn't look too happy. Can't think why, because I am determined to get tomatoes out of this one. I'm spending too much on them as it is! And also, I really just want to prove to all the gardeners in my life that I am capable of growing something without killing it.

Anyway, here it is. It seems to be going well so far. She didn't have flowers on when I started, so that must count for something. My girlfriend thinks we should call her Tom-ara, but as far as I'm concerned, I paid for her. I'm a single parent. Her name is my choice.

Ladies and gentlemen, please be upstanding for TOMATINA JR.