Ripening tomatoes

And about time, too. It looks like the harsh trimming I gave the tomato plants is finally paying off. Their fruits – which have stayed stubbornly green through the whole of the summer – are finally turning, and not before time.

The crop is still small, with perhaps a dozen ripe specimens, but it does include one Black Russian. This variety was our big experiment for 2009, and it’s fair to say that it hasn’t been a great success.

We started them off in the dining room, with a couple of dozen seeds in paper pots by the patio doors. By the time we transplanted them to the greenhouse for hardening up they were 5cm tall, and when they had doubled from there we put them into the big pots in which they would spend the summer.

You can’t say they weren’t pampered.

Now, nine months later, we have our first ripe tomato, and it looks like it’s going to be the only one.

Hmmm.

Still, it’s big, and we have visitors over for lunch at the weekend as we’re having a tree-cutting and shelf-drilling party, so perhaps then we’ll snip it off and share it.

After all this time, it’d better be good.

Black Russian tomato

Related posts:

1. The tomatoes are shooting
2. Transplanting the tomatoes
3. Planting Black Russian tomatoes