The Wild Ones

I took a deep breath and wielded the secateurs last week. Not more pruning. But taking out plants which had self-seeded and grown from last year’s fallen fruit. There were a couple that had grown quite large, showed no signs of stopping and it was getting increasingly tricky to negotiate them when walking round with the watering can etc.

I’d pulled up quite a few self-seeding starters and so somehow these had become ones, which even though I’d not got involved with their ongoing survival, I felt protective towards !  Surely misplaced in that I’d done nothing to assist them – not poured water nor snuck any plant food their way.

But I think that’s what made them such a source of wonder. Rooted down through protective black webbing and shooting up through surface gravel, these plants were the anthesis of the care regime received by their potted neighbours – and yet they grew and fruited. If I had to guess I’d say these were Black Cherry.

As a result I feel very ‘untomato lover like’ for bringing it all to an abrupt and premature end. So this post is a little picture tribute to the ‘tomato toughies’. And the only reason the top photo is an ‘after felling’ one, is that the plant had sprawled so far I couldn’t get its garden take-over bid in one frame until I’d cut it and collected it all together.

However on a much more positive note about the outcome of planned seed saving, take a look at the comments section of something I wrote back in February. I posted about new tomato varieties including  Moruno ( click on the link to go to post),  a variety which was avaliable as a fruit but not as seed. Several readers experimented with saving and then growing their own seeds from this variety – with great success- and they’ve recently added to the comments with updates on how it all went.