Fruitful efforts

First harvest of tomatoes for this year. Yes, I know they’re not fully ripe, but we’re having a lot of rainstorms lately, so they were at risk from both wind and blight. Wanted to make sure we got them! There are far more that aren’t anywhere near ripe yet. These are the first tomatoes I’ve grown in about a dozen years. 👍 #gardenharvest2018 #auckland #lifeinnz

A post shared by arthur_amerinz (@arthur_amerinz) on Feb 2, 2018 at 1:31pm PST

We’ve harvested the first tomatoes of the year (photo above). That represents a major change, and getting something done that’s been missing for a long time. Those efforts have been fruitful—literally and figuratively—and all of that is good.

We harvested the tomatoes yesterday because rain and storms were predicted, after a day of heavy rain on Thursday. So, we picked all the tomatoes that were even remotely close to being ripe because the storms lately have had a lot of wind, which is bad enough, but all that rain can cause blight—basically, it makes them rot on the plant. It was better to harvest them slightly early than to risk losing them altogether. They’ll still ripen in the house. But, as I said in the caption, there are probably more that are totally green than the number we harvested. We’ll see how they go.

As near as I can remember, the last time I grew tomatoes was 2005, the year before we moved back to Auckland. In the years since, I’d planned on growing tomatoes, among other things, but I really didn’t have any place to plant them other than pots, since the yard was mostly not usable. But I kept forgetting when I needed to start the seeds, and missed out for many years. This year, finally, was different.

The seeds came from supermarket tomatoes, all of which sprouted and grew. The problem with doing that is that if the plants were hyrbids, the fruit from the seeds may end up reverting to another, different tomato type. Fortunately, that didn’t happen. For the record, the type is a low-acid variety called Roma in New Zealand, though I’ve also seen them referred to as “Italian tomatoes”, especially when they’re tinned.

I did the same thing with capsicum seeds, and while I got plants, they didn’t produce anything, partly because I didn’t have a good spot for them (too shady), but maybe the seeds wouldn’t have produced capsicums, anyway. I’ll never know.

So, this year I finally got vegetable plants in the garden, and I’ve started harvesting the results. That’s a really good thing in itself, but it’s also something I’ve wanted to do for so many years, and, despite fighting fatigue, I did it. That feels good.

I don’t know how much more we’ll get to harvest this year. Actually, I don’t even know yet whether these are nice or not, since they’re not ripe enough to eat. And, of course, I have no idea what I’ll do next year (or for the winter, for that matter). Right now, none of that matters.

This year, I finally got something done that’s been missing for a long time, and those efforts have been fruitful—literally and figuratively. Right now, that’s enough.