THE TOMATO GRINGO

One of the happier memories of my childhood is that of pollenizing tomatoes with a rabbit’s tail in my father’s greenhouse in the north of England. Later in life I found myself teaching in the tomato town of Timbaki near Minoan Phaestos on the island of Crete, where acres of plastic sheeting shimmer like a lake in the scorching sun. Now I am eking out my days in central Chile, not far from Limache – another tomato town, whose municipal logo is a grinning tom. Sniffing my fingers as I pinch off shoots on my organic homestead I revel in the pungent scent of this queen of vegetables in the continent of her birth.Exporting them throughout the year, Chilean growers inject their tasteless, dry beefsteaks with hormones and spray them mercilessly in plastic tunnels which distintegrate in the sun and litter the countryside. To many consumers the word “organic” has an image of cranks and lefties. An organic licence costs more than you can earn in years of sales. But some small farmers still produce a chemical-free crop for their families.In my sheltered hermitage – hemmed in by steep fells – I grow toms for my kitchen. I sow in seed trays without fail on my birthday in late July. There is no need to pot up here. I transplant directly into raised beds in the summer months of January to March –old varieties commercially banned by the bureaucratic madness of the European Union but available to members of the Heritage Seed Library of the Henry Doubleday Research Association (patron: the Prince of Wales.) I sneaked a few packets into the country before I had bought my little farm twelve years ago.I once had a fine collection of rare varieties of Lycoperscum esculentum. They have cross-fertilized but are still robust: “Tibet –Appel”, transparent “plums” on straggly plants from that land of Buddhist monks, mystically delicious; “Fablonelystnyj”, sweet yellow “cherries” from an unknown Eastern European country which come out early and ramble like brambles to provide a late crop too (April and May); “Aranyalma”, a big post-war German yellow; “Salonika”, a large red from Greek Macedonia.

All these are cordons (one stem left to grow up canes or string). My one potato-leafed determinate (three or four trusses which stop without lopping) is a half-breed descendant of the Italian “Martina” and “Spanish Big Globe” – a massive red good for stuffing. My oval “Roma” I found on a visit to Athens. It crawls on the ground like a strawberry plant, needs neither supports nor pruning, and is the best for bottling.I usually have enough ripe tomatoes for a Christmas Day salad but this year they failed me. We have had many misty mornings in December – usually a hot month –and several overcast days in a row. If this is climate change, the effect here is minimal. As 2009 gets under way the toms are beginning to “paint themselves” as Don Prosper puts it. The old caretaker taught me to rub my hands with lemon juice before pruning to make washing them easier and to cut the ties from a clump of rushes, saving on string. I have tried to introduce drip-watering in my beds but Prospero is no friends of technological innovation and has finally convinced me that running water pumped from my well is what toms really need. Feeding the toms is simple. The earth in the orchard is stony but leaf mould from the native wood is rich and spongy. This together with kitchen compost, farm yard muck and some wood ash from the fireplace makes a satisfactory soil. I have heard about fancy Japanese composts which heat up to ignition point with dollops of milk and honey but I prefer to put these on my porridge and dung on the ground.The chief pests are starlings while the plantlets are still small (deterred by rustling copies of the “Weekend Telegraph”) and flocks of ground-running quail I plan to net one of these days. Borage grows naturally as a companion plant to guard against harmful insects; ladybirds make short shrift of aphids. Weeds are a bit of a problem: grass tough enough for a football pitch and a plant called “Amores secas” (“dry loves”) whose barbed seeds stick to your clothes. After the growing season these horrid plants are demolished by the donkeys “Melly” and “Matty”, who forage in the beds, dunging the soil at the same time.It appears that nobody in Chile knows how to make gazpacho (Andalusian chilled soup). I got my recipe forty years ago from a Scots lassie who trained under Elizabeth David at the Cordon Blue School in London. To serve six I boil a couple of eggs supplied by my neighbour, grind the yokes with salt, black peppercorns, a head of garlic, lemon juice and olive oil. Mix this paste with the fresh tomato juice, finely grated onion and cubes of cucumber (discarding the seeds); add green peppers for red juice and red ones for yellow toms. Leave in the fridge overnight and stir with a wooden spoon in the morning. Serve with croutons and the driest chilled sherry you can afford.If I don’t have enough tomatoes to make gazpacho, I mix a Bloody Mary or two. Tomatoes, one might say, are in my blood.