Tag Archives: tomatoes

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Here’s some slow motion excitement – an update on my tomatoes

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Heavy rain was forecast about a week ago, so I put on my biggest, most waterproofest hat and rushed this little prima donna/primo uomo indoors, and its lived there ever since.

It seems to me that it’s loving the indoor life, one of its ‘love apples’ going cheerful as Aperol almost instantly. The others still look a bit shy, but I’m hopeful.

Meanwhile it turned out that the day of heavy storms was not as bad as I thought it would be, at least not over us. So, perhaps my panic was a bit over primed, but maybe that’s what comes with being responsible for a star guest – in fact, this year, the only star guest on this blog, the only celebrity even. No idea who else would stand in … and we’ve got an interview scheduled for later in the year.

I’ll keep you posted.

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023

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Tomatoes and India and climate change

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My new interest in tomatoes has taken me to reading about the situation for the crop in India this year. It’s left me embarrassed to think that I’ve been fretting over a few tiny plants here in England, while in India entire crops have been wiped out by either too much rain, or too much heat, or both.

I can’t imagine Indian cuisine without tomatoes but apparently the price of tomatoes in New Delhi is now up by as much as 500% which, while excellent for those farmers whose crops did not fail, must be shocking for shoppers, and almost impossible for the budget end of the restaurant trade.

And it must be difficult for the tomatoes themselves to cope with shifting weather patterns. I never realised that the plants don’t really like the heat, apparently growing best in temperatures between 18C(64F) and 25C(77F). Even English summers now have patches that are hotter than that, as my own plants can testify, having been through their own mild summer hiccup – too much wind, too much heat, and sudden dollops of rain.

If their growing efforts are proving ‘difficult’ here in England, what is the word to describe the conditions faced by plants in India, the country that recently became the most ‘populous’ in the world?

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023

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A little more about tomato plants

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A week ago I posted about the smallest of my tomato plants, one of the crop still struggling up from the seeds that I planted from the same packet at the same time, slightly late in the season.

The smallest of the plants is still not making much progress, but today I looked at the biggest of its siblings and discovered these tiny ‘love-apples’ hiding in amongst the leaves. The name love-apple is new to me, and only recently discovered thanks to an old Encylopaedia Britannica, published in 1797, (if I have got the Roman numerals right – MDCCXCVII). This was how it described the tomato, entered under ‘solanum’.

We may have added to the way we eat tomatoes since this entry was listed but, as far as I can discover, they are still classified botanically as berries.

A final piece of tomato trivia that I found out from more recent online sources, is that the world’s largest producer of tomatoes, by far, is China.

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023