The Successful Rearing of, and Not Killing, Tomato Plants

17th August, 2025

So we're two months out - though I only realised this literally just now, looking at my previous post - and this is how we're doing on the tomato front. As you can see there has been some lovely growth. The above picture is definitely the best one, as it shows Tomatina's largest fruit's beautiful blushing colour, one which is just beginning to prickle from beneath the skin. She has lots of tomatoes growing now, as well as even more butter-yellow flowers.

Look, there are so many! After last year's tomato disaster, I had lost faith in my gardening ability, such that it was. I'm feeling more confident now. Well, to be honest, the credit doesn't really go to me. I bought the thing, sure, and I've been watering and fertilising her, but my girlfriend is the one who placed her in a more suitable pot and, just recently, stripped her of her extraneous stems (this is apparently something you're supposed to do). So thanks, girlfriend.

Here she is at full force.

It's strange, but seeing how much the plant has grown has really made me stop and think. A mere two months ago, she was a small bundle of leaves in a tiny plastic pot. A bit of water and fertiliser and words of affection that had my neighbours looking at me like I was mental for chatting to a plant has caused such growth. This is just par for the course for existing on this spinning green rock, of course, but I can't help but feel that time slips away from me at a rate too quick to get ahold of. Every time I try and stop and take a breath, be more mindful, live for today, I am prevented by the incessant whirring of my brain. It spins and whirls and gets hot and doesn't cool. I live every day in such a state of utter delirium that they all blur, gradually, into one huge, sticky, monstrous mass. It grows claws and teeth and growls angrily as it rears its ugly head over the horizon of my time. I would just like it all to stop, please.

I read a few years ago about an uncontacted - well, they can't have been that uncontacted; lightly-contacted? - tribe out in the Amazon who had no concept of time. I think they understood the premise, but it held virtually no significance for them. I imagine they must have been baffled by our obsession with it. I mean, everyone in our part of the world seems concerned about time. Kids learn to read clocks. Those kids grow into men who, cursing, shave their heads when time decides to set their hairlines way back, and women who sob when they see that age is working its magic on their faces, so they pump themselves with chemicals in a vain attempt to reverse it. (Obviously this is not everyone - I am being hyperbolic for literary effect. But you see my point). Of course, I include myself in this count. I guess I'm at an age where I am an adult, absolutely, indubitably, but I feel that I have nothing to show for it. My parents were married at my age, with children; my grandparents were too, and they owned their house. Part of this is just because the world we live in now is different, vastly so, from the world of even thirty years ago. But I feel, often, as though I am a failure, still half a child myself.

Time marches on. A year ago, I wondered how different my life would be; next summer, will things be much different? The answer, this year, is no. So I'm not going to ask myself that again. I am sick of ruminating. Really, I should be letting life wash over me, a downpour of fine rain that only gets you terribly wet if you insist on staying out in it.

(If I can work on doing that - on changing my thinking in such a way - perhaps then next year will be different and, in the summertime, I'll make a post totally unlike this one).

Anyway, I'm wittering now. Check out my tomatoes. They'll be ripe and delicious before long.

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.