Picking tomatoes shouldn’t be this challenging

As I open the greenhouse door, spiders the size of pound coins drop onto my head.  The webs they have woven to entrap me wrap themselves like tentacles around my hair and arms.  I step in, struggling to place my foot in the one gap that remains between the growbags and pots, and reach further in.  Now it’s the tomato plants themselves which mount an attack, getting their own back for the under-watering and the over-watering and the insufficient pinching out of side shoots.  They entangle me in their stems and their leaves and cover me with strange glowing yellow-green powder.  (Can anyone tell me what on earth that stuff is?)

Then I wonder how I can find the time to make tomato-chilli jam (nectar of the gods) before this mound of tomatoes is fit only for compost.  (Look closely at this picture and you’ll see many signs of imperfect gardening.  Several split tomatoes.  Holey spinach beet.  A sneaky weed – spurge, I think.

 

Some of the tomatoes, as you can see, are already mostly fit only for compost already. A touch of over-watering?

On the plus side, we seem to have an aubergine developing.  I whisper this.  If it comes to anything, it will be the first aubergine I’ve successfully grown in about ten years of intermittent attempts.  This is why I haven’t taken a photo to show you.  Shyness may cause it to shrivel.