After decided to take down all the tomato plants to make room for a winter greenhouse, we had a lovely mixed harvest of "Jen's tangerine" heirloom tomatoes as well as red, yellow (another heirloom variety called Galina) and green cherry tomatoes.
This was my chance to try out some chutney recipes I'd found on a fantastic blog I'd been reading recently,
Life in Mud Splatted Boots and in my lovely Preserves book.
We'd been harvesting tomatoes for about a month and a half and I estimated we had picked about 5-6 kilos of tomatoes in total. Not bad, considering the small tomatoes weren't planted outside until mid June! I seriously underestimated how big the plants were going to get, and to be honest I didn't think all the heirloom seedlings would all survive being transplanted so late in the season...but they did, and they flourished! It turned into a tomato jungle and I couldn't bear to remove any of the plants - I was so proud of the heirloom seedlings that had survived and I wanted to see what the tomatoes would look and taste like. I'm going to plan the garden space properly for next Summer, and lessons learned, the Galina yellow cherry tomato plants grew to about six feet and very bushy and the bright yellow tomatoes looked beautiful next to the dark green leaves.
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| Seedlings - pre planting... It looks so bare! |
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| Small tomato plants |
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| Tomato plants before I staked them with Galeuse d'eysines pumpkin to the right - starting to take over the patio |
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| Close up of a spider that made his home in the tomatoes for about two months, I moved the little guy to another part of the garden before taking the tomato plants down |
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| Galina yellow cherry tomatoes |
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| Jen's Tangerine tomatoes, yellow Galina cherry tomatoes and bush cherry tomatoes with a couple of Summer crookneck squash |
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Tomato harvest
Chutney recipes and oven dried tomato recipes to follow... |
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