05/09/2025
Tomatoes - a short story
A few weeks ago I had the satisfaction of processing the first of these lovely Roma tomatoes from the polytunnel in our garden. It’s been a long summer of childcare (no complaints ever), holiday cover, and garden tending, so It was a pleasing end of summer job to be able to harvest and then jar these within the space of a couple hours. whilst the garden has been producing for a couple of years now, in some ways it felt like this was the first proper year and the culmination of years of planning, lots of manual labour and lots of patience.
Its always interesting to wonder whether these things are worth doing. The answers reveal themselves in time and are never straight forward. Whether the time spent is validation of anything other than the education that comes with it. Economically, it makes zero sense. The time and money spent make it a non starter, in particular for the amount of tomato we go through in the pizzeria. Sometimes we have to admit defeat on flavour too. It’s not worth doing something just for the sake of it, it has to taste great. These, I can confirm, taste bloomin great. So the vast proportion of motivation comes from the education, along with the excitement of watching a process from the very start to a finish that culminates with a bite of pizza and an excitable smile to confirm it was indeed worth it. Watching customers come in and share in that excitement is the icing on the cake.
