FROM TOMATO TO NOMATO

AND staying in the “Gardener’s real World”, the rabbits have eaten my damn tomatoes. I have grown bush tomatoes in pots in the veggie patch this year and was pleased with how they were doing.

As two of the tomatoes were getting riper and redder every day, the big question was just when to pick them … should I leave them one more day …? Obviously not. The rabbits beat me to it. Or, according to Google, it could have been a squirrel. Either way, something furry beat me to harvesting my first lovely ripe tomatoes.

Home-grown tomatoes always remind me of a friend who wrote for The Telegraph and who deciding to diarise growing his own “tasty toms” in his London back yard one year. He described the whole process wonderfully, from building raised beds, to nurturing the little seedlings, to painstakingly staking and tying in, to waiting eagerly for the tomatoes to ripen. They never did. It was one of “those years” and the weather, and gardening gods, were against him.

The moral of his story was that he calculated that the three tomatoes he did manage to part-ripen on the kitchen windowsill cost him an eye-watering £73 each. He hasn’t bothered since.

To add insult to injury I found a great gardening sign, which stated, “Gardening is cheaper than therapy – and you get tomatoes.” Perhaps I should have added, “Unless the wildlife beat you to it.”