Black Russian, Old Rose, Green Zebra… Things have come some way from pallid English salads. Though I love a butterhead lettuce, tomatoes are now as likely multishaped and multicoloured, more intensely flavoured.
Plot 29 started with tomatoes, trying to find a home for a few competitive colleagues to grow together, to redefine our roles, get a bit muddy, grow special things in a special place. Now it’s just me and, more occasionally, Howard, though my tomatoes are grown at home because August and September tend to signal rain and reawaken blight on the site.
Many of my plot neighbours still grow them in a race to ripen before the downpour. This year they might make it. Some grow blight-resistant varieties saved from seed. They are mostly successful. I colonise the roof terrace at home, beg my wife for space, camp out a few plastic pots among the more elegant roses and summer flowers. She almost always relents and allows a plant armistice.
Tomatoes are greedy for water and hungry for feed. I first trim off the side shoots and later, most of the leaves. I brush against them for fragrance, the most intensely fruity thing I know. I will the fruits to succeed, though sometimes I leave them too long. It is almost as though I have a reluctance to eat them. I don’t really, but I think for me they are forever tied to the end of summertime. When the rooftop tomatoes are gone so too is the heat and the bright light.
I’ll pick a few of my last tomatoes today, hopefully warm from the sun. I’ll scatter with sea salt and good olive oil, though they’re as likely to be eaten whole with Henri as if from a bag of sweets. Together we’ll savour the slow fading of another summer.
Allan Jenkins’s Plot 29 (4th Estate, £9.99) is out now. Order it for £8.49 from guardianbookshop.com
