Tomatoes are sexy, difficult plants. But I love them

Growing tomatoes from seed is a palaver. Early stages include, but are not limited to: sowing in a homemade greenhouse (freezer-bag + lolly-stick for headroom); finding space in one’s inexplicably windowsill-less flat; brushing shoots regularly for stem-strength; repotting deeply to encourage opportunistic extra roots; hardening off seedlings with ever-longer hours outdoors, like starting a child at nursery; replanting; hand-pollinating. I’m not even joking. And, because breathing in those deliciously scented leaves is the closest I’ll ever get to perfect calm, I favour the more labour-intensive cordons, or vine-types, not the thickety, altogether more basic, bush verities. I shun the effortless yields alleged to come from revolutionary upside-down pot-innovations, or hydroponic Frankensteinian freaks. No: I’m spending my coffee break removing side-shoots from the elbows of each green branch, then tying them in with tarry-smelling twine. I grow my tomatoes slowly, skilfully. Unsuccessfully.Because it’s all very well doing things correctly, or nearly. Like a king inviting everyone to the christening except the bad fairy, Macbeth eliminating most of Scotland but forgetting Banquo’s ghost, there is no precaution against heartbreak. By which I mean Phytophthora infestans, or tomato blight.

Blight ruins everything. It rides in from nowhere, appearing on what in Britain we’d call the first baking summer day, but elsewhere counts as dampness, splotching haulms with rot, curling leaves, greying every unripe fruit; that is, almost all of them. Long after the first attack I fought on, like a knackered Pict facing waves of ripped Romans; no poxy spores would defeat me. I’d snuggle the pale survivors with bananas, whose ethylene might trick them into ripening; turn them into green tomato chutney which I then had to eat. But, each year, every plant succumbed, whether two floors up or, to my outraged shock, on my new allotment, despite being well-staked, fed and defoliated for better air circulation. So I stopped. Dead.

Last year, I planted not one tomato. OK, one. But that didn’t count. And although I wish the overgrown pickling cucumbers and furry chicory had made up for it, that would be a lie. It was like not-gardening; how I missed the smell, the tying-in. Maybe even the disappointment.

So this year I bought six allegedly blight-resistant Cocktail Crush seedlings, two this morning, as confessed. Long experience had taught me that floppiness, in tomato-plants, is not to be feared. It merely means they are “on the flag”, which evokes much more head gardener glamour than “a bit dry”. As the garden-centre-lady said, “tomatoes are quite dramatic”; I can easily train these attention-seekers into verticality. And yes, now my entire happiness rests in the feeble cells of these few plants, but what choice did I have? One can buy other blight-deniers: Burlesque, Honeymoon. Nagina. But with names like those, I had to ignore them. I do still have some self-respect.

Illustration by Clara Dupré