Owen Pidgeon: A mixed tomato harvest

If you have been harvesting and eating richly flavoured, home grown tomatoes in recent weeks, you are following in the footsteps of the Aztecs of Mexico, the Spaniards and the Italians. The Italian city of Naples was a Spanish territory in the 16th century but one of the benefits of this colonisation was that it was the first Italian region to receive the yellow ridged tomato, which provided the Italian name of pomodoro – the golden apple. Naples has been central to so much of the development of things tomato.

Over the ensuing centuries, people throughout Europe bred and developed strains of tomatoes that were adapted to their local conditions. Italian beefsteak and oxheart were followed by the tomato paste Romas. Naples is famous for adding tomato paste to the flat bread, by the middle of the 18th century to form the first modern pizza.

France pursued the breeding of salad tomatoes, desirous of beautifully round yellow and red varieties. So there came about the Jaune Flamee and Jaune Negib and the St Pierre red tomato. The Russians gave attention to the smoky, purple black tomatoes with amazing taste. Czech tomatoes include the large pink beefsteak varieties, including the wonderful Marianna's Peace and early maturing plum sized red varieties, including Olomovic. Another large beefsteak one of distinction, for me, is the Gregori's Altai tomato, which comes from the bordering mountains between Siberia and China.

Of course, the New World settlers took with them seeds of many of European varieties and began to breed their own.

Heirloom tomatoes give you wonderful variety and great taste. Perhaps the downside is lower overall yields, unless the season is magical.

I do not consider this summer past to have been the best for tomato production. We had a big summer storm that washed through the orchard and led to waterlogging in some of the vegetable gardens, so that one section of the tomato crop died off "overnight". They are quite a temperamental plant, in their own ways.

However, in the past two months we have certainly enjoyed the delicious flavours of some 50 different varieties that we chose to grow. There are three distinct groupings: the cherry tomatoes to be used in salads, the plum sized tomatoes and the large salad and slicing tomatoes.

As mentioned in a December article, we did manage to pick three varieties before Christmas but I am of the opinion that the quest for such early tomatoes in Canberra does have a downside too. The plants have been growing for quite some time, before the warmer days triggered their flowering and fruit setting, that they did not have much left in their growing season.

Seedlings that were started a month later and have grown more rapidly through the hotter months have produced better crops.

Home-grown, sun-ripened tomatoes can be used in so many dishes. You can take an evening to produce your own tomato sauce or tomato relish with just a few other ingredients. Try drying some tomatoes or turning some of your surplus into delicious cold summer soups.

 Owen Pidgeon runs the Loriendale Organic Orchard near Hall.