Two harvesting landmarks have been passed in the last couple of days – our first tomatoes from the polytunnel and our first blackberries from the allotment.

We’ve got various types of tomato growing but this year’s first past the post was ‘Orange Rapture’, which I’ve been cultivating successive generations of from seeds taken from a supermarket tomato. Despite being the most weedy looking of my seedlings they ended up surviving better and make up the majority of plants in the polytunnel. I’m also looking forward to the San Marzano tomatoes, another supermarket sourced variety. One of the plants had a stem which had got partially buried and begun rooting, which I cut off and, to my delight, it seems to have established itself as a new plant.

Meanwhile, our Oregon Thornless blackberry has ripened its first fruits. There are plenty more growing on it and it promises to be a good year Raspberry production on the allotment is also going well and I got another 100g of those today, the biggest single harvest so far.

Hurrah for harvests!