Let Her Paint an Inch Thick ...

An even finer example than marriage of the triumph of hope of experience is the planting of outdoor tomatoes in England.  Every year I do this, and every year I end up with dozens of dead plants and, at best, a couple of green golf balls with skins thicker than a Wall Street bank chairman's and an aversion to ripening even stronger than Gordon Brown's to leaving office.

Tomatoes are the prima donnas of the vegetable world - prone, as far as I can see, to every pest, disease, and blight known to botanical science and with the resistance and fortitude of wet cardboard. They parch instantly if the weather is dry and they rot it it's even the slightest bit damp. And if they do, by some miraculous combination of weather and absence of malicious wildlife, manage to reach something like maturity, they then need constant attention to a feeding regime so complicated that even a faddish New York diet-queen would blanch.

Probably it's something to do with being Italian and pining for the slopes of Vesuvius where they really belong; or perhaps it's some psychosomatic trauma to do with being taken for a vegtable when you're really a fruit.  Anyway, the whole business is like Hamlet talking to Yorick's skull -  "Now get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her,  let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come": you know it will end badly but you've got to go through with it all the same.

Anyway, here are some of this year's victims, and at least they're environmentally sound.

The square pots are cut-down juice cartons - stab a few holes in the bottom to let them drain.  The variety is San Marzano, the classic Italian plum tomato, which I have never tried before; but I still know, I'm afraid, to what favour they will come...