How a tomato set my hankering for the good life

ANOTHER LIFESOMEWHERE IN THE pastoral wilds of Co Kilkenny, in a summer long ago, the wife of a Finnish jewellerymaker brought slices of tomato to the lunch table: slices a centimetre thick, a hand's breadth across, jewel-bright with olive oil and scattered with chopped green basil. This simple revelation of what tomatoes should be, enfolded in mouthfuls of sweetness and scent, set my early hankering for the good life.

The current cultivation in my polytunnel of the Italian beefsteak tomato, Pantano Romanesco, thus begins on a note of deep fulfilment. This tomato is all it was cracked up to be in the blog of Nicky Kyle of Co Dublin, arch-oracle of Ireland’s organic gardeners. That I have to grope for its fist-sized fruit in a thicket of stems and leaves, part of it brought crashing down by sheer weight, is entirely my own doing. As the dreaded grey mould, botrytis, hovers in the dog days of late August, this is not the way to do it.

More would-be shrubs than vines, Pantano and its fellow Italians are flamboyant, gesticulating growers, throwing out multiple stems and fractal multiplications of shoots, so that order can be kept only by generous spacing, judicious feeding and assiduous daily patrols with nipping fingers. It turns out I have let them have too much their own way.

The choice of tomatoes for the home gardener has never been greater, as a network of “heirloom” seed suppliers meets the growing appetite for prehybrid, soft-skinned, asymmetrical, finely flavoured fruit so utterly foreign to the supermarket pack. But the commercial, billiard-ball staples can be older than we think. In my collection of such things, a Department of Agriculture leaflet on tomato-growing dated 1956 has many unfamiliar names in its list – Scarlet Knight, Potentate, Victory – but also today’s Ailsa Craig and Moneymaker (“the worst variety” in the view of Lawrence Hills, the English organic sage).

The department believed tomatoes to have been brought from South America to Europe by Christopher Columbus in 1498, but this credit is generally denied him in more modern attempts at their history. The authoritative EU-Sol agency, with the germplasm of almost 7,000 domesticated tomato lines in its collection, gets no more precise than the 1500s, and it was 1753 before Linnaeus correctly identified the plant as a species of Solanum, like the potato (and thus similarly susceptible to late blight).

Solanum lycopersicum is clearly very different from its wild predecessors in Peru, or the Atacama Desert of Chile, and the root of its common name in Mexico’s ancient Aztec was an accident of trade. After Spanish conquistadores brought the plant back, southern Europeans were the first to adopt its fruit, northern Europeans being frightened off by the frequent toxicity of many well-known Solanaceae (deadly nightshade, for example).

The early tomatoes were probably small, rough-skinned and yellow; those with red skins arrived much later. It is the natural red pigment in tomatoes, lycopene, that has lately acquired such a powerful reputation for human good. Over the past few decades, one scientific study after another has credited its antioxidant properties with lower risk of cancer (of the prostate, in particular) and cardiovascular disease.

By a nice irony, the lycopene (one of the many beneficial carotenoids in fruit and vegetables) is most assimilable from processed tomato sauces and pastes, as in the ketchup most generally glopped on to platefuls of high-cholesterol fried food.

My old department leaflet was prepared in the early days of tomato hybridisation and warned, rightly, that “on no account” should seed be saved from the new F1 varieties, which would not breed true. It did, however, offer a detailed account of how to save seed from traditional, open-pollinated sorts. (The term “heirloom”, with all its connotations of the precious and conservable, had yet to emerge.)

The seed pulp should be scooped into a bowl of earthenware or glass, with an equal quantity of a 10 per cent solution of washing soda. Left in a warm place overnight, this will remove the jelly from the seeds. Well washed, and removing any floating seeds, the rest should be washed and dried (but not in direct sun), then rubbed between the hands to separate them and stored in cotton or paper containers open to the air.

In contrast to such procedures are events on the Galapagos Islands, whose salt- and drought-resistant tomatoes are now of keen interest to today’s genetic modifiers. According to Anthony Huxley in his book Plant and Planet (1974), the seeds of one species unique to the islands will germinate only after they have passed through one of the giant Galapagos tortoises.

Their digestion is as leisurely as their walking speed, but the tomatoes are spread well around.

Eye on nature

We hear a grasshopper warbler singing in the fields around our house. Doing all this during the daytime I can understand, in order to catch grasshoppers. Why does he do it all night?

Susan Robb, Achill Island, Co Mayo

The male grasshopper warbler calls to defend his territory and to communicate with a mate and is more persistent in the breeding season. It gets its name because the call is like that of the grasshopper.

We heard an animal calling recently at night near our house. The call is a short whistle, and the response was similar, like a squeaking toy. Are these owls?

David Wilcoxson, Ballinglen, Co Wicklow

It sounds like the call of young long-eared owls.

I was fascinated by a robin recently. It pecked an ant and each time went into a contortion, fluttering madly, swishing its wings and tail and ruffling with its beak at these feathers, all in three seconds. It then repeated the performance.

Tom Lee, Sandycove, Co Dublin

The robin was anting. It crushed the ant along its wings and tail, applying formic acid, probably to kill parasites.

What animal, badger or hedgehog, dug holes in my lawn?

Joe Molloy, Ballinasloe, Co Galway

Badger.

Michael Viney welcomes observations at Thallabawn, Carrowniskey PO, Westport, Co Mayo, or viney@anu.ie. Please include a postal address