Today was an exciting one, as the first batch of tomatoes was finally ready for picking. It’s a lovely thing to do, as the vines smell so good when you snip them, and of course you get the bonus of a colourful bowl of fruit, too.

In terms of the whole crop, I didn’t take much – just 335g of the yellow Golden Sunrise, and 200g of the Gardeners’ Delight cherry tomatoes – as the other are not yet quite ripe, but that was still a bowl of 30 or so by the time I was done, and the taste is extraordinary.

They are so tomatoey they almost turn your mouth inside out, and it catches in your throat, all of which is far nicer than it sounds. If the rest of the crop is this good, it’s going to be difficult going back to shop-bought ones in the autumn and winter.

Was it worth it, financially? Absolutely. Organic cherry tomatoes on the vine at Sainsbury’s are presently £7.96 per kilo, so just this first 200g, worth £1.59, has paid for the entire crop of 500 or so tomatoes already, without the others having yet been picked (or even, in most cases, ripened).

The closest equivalents to the yellow tomatoes I could find were yellow cherry tomatoes at Ocado, which are £7.16 per kilo (although currently unavailable). That would make today’s 355g haul of yellows worth £2.54.

So, in total, today’s snipping of the vines was worth £4.13, which is a very good start to the crop indeed.

Related posts:

1. The First Potato Harvest
2. More tomatoes than we can cope with
3. A stunted harvest