Ridiculous, I know, but I’m excited today because I spotted the first blush of colour on a tomato in the new vegetable patch–planted a month ago on our old compost heap.
How long from first blush to first bite?
I’m counting the days.
Depends in part on the weather.
Hot days are forecast–so perhaps not so long to wait.
Bit like opening an advent calendar, day-to-day, waiting for Christmas–agony, I remember.
And it’s not only tomatoes that are keeping me enthralled. We just ate our first cucumber–the short stubby kind–that can be bitter, or sweet as can be.
Julien, who helps us with the garden and grows vegetables for a living, told us:
“If you pick them in the morning, they are less likely to be bitter. The unpleasantness builds up during the day.”
I’m looking for the second little beauty to mature, to test the theory.
He also advises cleaning the knife used to cut away infected leaves before moving on to the next tomato, courgette or cucumber plant.
Makes sense.
And water tomatoes rarely, he says–this encourages their roots to delve deeper and it increases the intensity of the taste. And pick them late in day when they’ve absorbed all the sunshine.
One of the courgette plants was given to us by our neighbour, Tom, and is a different variety from the other three. It resembles the lighter ridged zucchini our friend Helen uses for her courgette pasta at Boggioli, their olive farm in Tuscany.
I think it yields a creamier sauce.
(See the AUTUMN section of my new cook book Mediterranean Vegetarian Cooking, p. 158.)
Julian, normally a genial, droll character, said darkly before departing:
“I may have to pour vinegar on the plot–I’m so jealous!”.
Echoes of the film, Manon des Sources?
Robin Ellis 