The criminally underrated deliciousness of green tomatoes

The art of growing good tomatoes badly. Plus how to make the most of those end of season emeralds hanging from your vines

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‘Tigerella’ toms, growing on my sort-of-allotment

This has been, without question, my greatest ever year for growing tomatoes. Though that reads very much like a brag, it is actually more of an awkward admission. Because my bumper crop of sweet, juicy, pop-in-the-mouth flavour-bombs has absolutely nothing to do with any intervention on my part. (Something which is concerningly the case with most of my gardening successes.)

Every year, around April time, I buy a handful of tomato plug plants. I never start my tomatoes from seed because I do not own the suitable equipment, nor do I have the requisite space. The garden centre/nursery shopping list usually comprises of a couple of ‘Gardener’s Delight’ – a reliable cropper that always produces decent numbers of flavourful cherry tomatoes – plus a couple of others besides, which tend never to produce as much or as tasty fruit as the GDs, and so are never recalled for a subsequent growing season. 

This year, the two ‘Gardener’s Delight’ plug plants were joined by one ‘Tigerella’ and one beefsteak variety which may or may not have been ‘Marmande’ but, in all honesty, I have no idea, because I immediately lost the label.

Could ‘Tigerella’ be my new favourite tomato? Probably!

It’s the wrong time of year to be recommending tomato cultivars but, while we’re here, let it be known that ‘Tigerella’ may just be my new favourite. Slightly larger than a typical cherry, but smaller than your average generic supermarket salad tomato, they are packed with flavour and painted, as the name suggests, with these gorgeous little tiger-like stripes – especially attractive in their unripened green-on-green colourway.

In summers past, these four vines would have occupied individual 30cm pots in the sunniest corner of my garden. I would have watered them a few times a week – daily during periods of especially hot weather – assiduously pinched out the little suckers that emerge between the central stem and its branches, and supported their upwards growth by tying them in to a bamboo cane or similar upright structure.

Not this year. Oh no. In May, I became the proud custodian of a two metre by one metre raised bed in an experimental new “community growing garden” managed by the local council. We are not meant to call it an allotment, because for all sorts of technical reasons it is not one, but in the Earthworm household, that is what it represents to us: our mini allotment. It is an unbelievably precious resource which I am hugely grateful to have first-come-first-served my way into.

My 2m x 1m raised bed in the “don’t call it an allotment” community growing garden. A hot mess

It is also a five minute walk from where I live. Whilst that is undeniably close, it is also far enough to experience the full force of my laziness. The tomato plants that grew in the allotment this year did not get watered every day during hot weather. They were propped up against bamboo supports during their first week or two, and then left to collapse into a floppy heap of entangled branches and intertwining stems. The occasional sucker was pinched out, but mostly the plants were left to grow and sprawl as nature intended: messily. 

According to gardening lore, I should have been punished for this neglect. The plants should have suffered from dehydration. Their disorderly, tangled up leaves should have yellowed from powdery mildew. Their unsupported stems should have snapped under the weight of their top-heavy growth. Their un-pinched-out suckers should have resulted in the un-fed roots struggling to meet their growing demands, and concentrated the plant’s energies into supporting this superfluous green growth at the cost of producing flowers and fruit.

As you’ve doubtless guessed, none of these things happened. The tomato gods saw my lacklustre approach and smiled upon me with their succulent grace. By mid-August, my family was eating tomatoes three meals a day. Needless to say, next year, in the name of science, I will be replicating this hands-off approach. 

A few days ago, I declared (to myself, internally) that enough was enough. Whilst these tomato plants had served us well, it was time for them to make way for the autumn/winter veg seedlings waiting in the wings [my patio] to take their place. Any remaining fruit – mostly green, but also spanning the full traffic light spectrum of ripeness – now had but one destiny: to become a jarred accompaniment to cheese on toast, cheese on crackers, or any number of other cheese-centric delights.

If you’ve grown tomatoes this year, and you have any emerald gems still adorning their trusses, I can categorically state that there is no greater fate for them than a green tomato & chilli jam. 

For the recipe that I followed, from a hastily Googled blog called Farmersgirl Kitchen, you’ll need about 1.5kg green tomatoes plus five or six chillies (depending on the heat of the chillies you use, and how explosive you like your preserves – mine are a tongue-numbingly hot ‘Chenzo’ variety which, for what it’s worth, were also grown on my allotment).

I didn’t have quite enough green tomatoes to make up the full 1.5kg, so supplemented with about 350g of ripe ones

The list of ingredients is rounded out by granulated sugar (I only had caster, so used that instead), garlic, ginger, fish sauce (I used a vegan alternative), and red wine vinegar (cider vinegar, in my case). It’s a pretty straightforward method to follow. Especially if, like me, you don’t bother first blitzing most of the ingredients into a paste, but just chop them up roughly and chuck them into your heavy-bottomed pan. 

Ten minutes of prep time and 90 minutes of slow cooking later, and I was blessed with five jars of gooey, flavourful, fiery brilliance. It is so good, in fact, that I was half tempted not to make it public knowledge that I had made it, lest I feel any guilt about the fact I am giving absolutely none of it away to any family or friends. 

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Did you grow any tomatoes this year? If so, which varieties? Was this a tomato-growing year to remember? Or one best forgotten? And if you have any green tomatoes still, then what, pray tell, will you be doing with them?