The first tomatoes beginning to ripen.

The wait is almost over!

After weeks and months of hovering, I’m about to learn what kind of tomatoes I’m growing. Yup, that will teach me to plant seeds from packets where the instructions are in a foreign language. It appears I’m growing a larger cherry tomato – and to be fair, the fruit on the vine does resemble the picture of the fruits on the seed packet. I just wasn’t sure about the scale of the photo and was hoping they would be regular sized tomatoes.

The fruits are starting to blush a sweet salmon-pink, and I’m guessing that means they’re as big as they’re going to grow. They’re currently about 5cm in height and 2-3cm across.

Cutting from the tomato plant growing steadily.

The plant has been a whitefly magnet, and I’ve had to prune the affected leaves and more to improve air circulation and allow sunlight through to all the leaves. However, I believe the pruning is beneficial to the plant.

Out of sheer curiosity, I also planted a couple of suckers that I pruned off. Two out of three took root and have been growing steadily. I think I’m going to have too many tomato plants on my hands if I keep this up, because the first plant that’s growing is a steady fruiter. There are almost 20 fruits currently developing on it, with lots more flowers on the way. And I have another two plants growing as well.

Tomato plant growing against a tall support stake.

I haven’t kept strictly to the credo of cutting away all the suckers. You know me… I have to experiment with different things before I decide on a future course. The first plant has branched out quite a bit, and I’ve built a support for it as it grew and spread. The second plant will be more of a main stem only plant – it’s already got a tall, strong support stake that it’s growing against, and I’m interested to see just how high it can grow. With my luck, higher than the two metres that the support stake is.

I reckon the tomatoes should ripen completely in the next couple of days. I hope the whiteflies – or any other pests I haven’t noticed – haven’t affected the fruits in any way. In the meantime, it’s maintenance and feeding as usual.

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