[13th September]
I spent the afternoon going over the tomato plants, trying to tidy them up a bit. As I think I’ve mentioned before, my father-in-law grew the tomatoes this year, but hasn’t been happy with them and of late has largely given up looking after what is left, content to just pull a few cherry tomatoes off the vines to have with salads. Today however my wife wanted a decent pile of tomatoes picking to make pizza sauce tomorrow. So I spent a hideously sweaty (you know it’s bad when even you can tell how bad you smell) afternoon in the polytunnel, weeding, picking all the ripe large fruit, sorting through all the “windfalls” to either keep or throw them in my son’s anaerobic digester, removing any split fruit and generally tidying up the plants a bit, until my hands were black with tomato sap and pollen and tingling from having grabbed one nettle too many. There are still plenty of cherry toms for the in-laws and actually quite a few ripening larger fruit that weren’t visible before I got to work, so hopefully there’ll be sufficient time for them to finish before we have to call it a day.
I think we’re getting very close to the point of picking all the ripe chiles too. We have one string in the airing cupboard drying at the moment. I’ll do the same with the rest I think, leaving the green ones on the plants as long as possible.