Scotland: National Rural Network
Connecting Rural Scotland - Promoting Rural Growth

By Patrick Vickery

It was brought to my attention recently by a lady from Conon Bridge that many of these Rural Ramblings refer to food, so for her I must mention an exceedingly good bacon and tomato sandwich I consumed recently in Tain. Most tasty.

Now if you feel the urge to grow tomatoes to complement a home-made bacon sandwich yourself then beware as tomato growing is an occupation fraught with conversational difficulty. Just inadvertently mention your tomato plants to a tomato enthusiast (and there are thousands of them out there) and you could be stuck for hours listening politely to every conceivable way of nurturing these smelly plants. And such strange names, too: Big Boy, Supersonic, Tiny Tim, Outdoor Girl, Money Maker, the list goes on and on.

Incidentally, for all you tomato growers, bananas exude a barely detectable gas (ethylene) that aids the tomato ripening process. The gas is flammable as well, although you would need a large number in a confined space to create any sort of explosion. Indeed, there was an incident in Chicago, 1946, that bears graphic witness to this when a poorly ventilated banana warehouse exploded killing a number of banana workers. A single banana is quite safe, however, no need to worry about that because it's only at large banana gatherings that difficulties arise. My tip of the month, then, is this: if your tomatoes need ripening at the end of the growing season put them on a newspaper (Ross-Shire Journal) in the kitchen drawer, add one banana and ‘Bob's your Uncle', ‘Fanny's your Aunt', that should do the trick.

Now before you reach this tomato ripening stage you have to grow the things first and Bull's Dung - yes, Bull's Dung - is the perfect medium (thank you for that ‘Tomato Man' from Conon Bridge, married incidentally to the aforementioned lady from Conon Bridge). It has something to do with the testosterone content, apparently, which brings on the ‘toms' a treat, good grief, what a thought, good lord, but an excellent conversation stopper should you ever need one.

Now I could win prizes for my tomatoes if I wanted to. I could grow the best in Scotland, juicy, red and tasty. I could grow the best in the country. But I don't and here's the reason why.

Many years ago my grandparents employed the services of a part-time gardener (a bit like me perhaps?) to help out in the garden, a man called Tom, good at his job and particularly renowned throughout the district for his tomatoes. A tomato grower par excellence. Champion tomatoes, they were, tomatoes with exceedingly good flavour, although strangely enough the plants themselves were quite spindly and poor-looking and not really the sort of specimens that you would expect to bear good fruit despite the fact that the end product was truly magnificent.

Whenever there was a family gathering Tom's tomatoes were always on the menu, always discussed. "Tasty tomatoes, these . . . lovely flavour . . . prize winning fruits . . . splendid texture . . . wonderful colour . . ." and so on and so forth which is the reason why we called him ‘Tom' when in fact his real name was John.

A couple of years ago, and from a highly reliable source, I discovered that Tom had a secret ingredient for growing tomatoes and, to be perfectly frank, it put me off tomatoes for quite some time. Urine. His special ingredient was urine. The house had a septic tank, you see, emptied annually, and Tom held on to the top layer to use as a liquid feed for his tomato plants. He may even have given them the occasional sprinkling himself now and then. Good heavens. So I could grow the best tomatoes in the country if I wanted to, no doubt about that, and win prizes for them too, but I don't fancy the idea, not now, do you?

Copyright Patreick Vickery

This article first appeared in the Ross-shire Journal and on the Rural Gateway website