Photographs of this planting through the 2026 season, oldest first.
The photographs
Week of 29 JuneA Big Boy tomato on 29 June with the early sun behind it, two green fruits still finely furred over the shoulders and the nearer one trailing its shriveled flower, water hanging in clear round drops all along the undersides of the stems.Week of 29 JuneA Big Boy tomato on 29 June looked down into, one fruit swinging from a jointed hairy stalk with the shriveled flower still stuck to its tip and a second only just set on the main stem, a sunlit treeline filling the top of the frame.Week of 29 JuneA Big Boy tomato on 1 July, one green fruit still trailing its shriveled flower under recurved sepals, every stem and leaf underside on the plant furred white, and white clover in flower right up to it in hard short-shadowed sun.Week of 13 JulyA Big Boy tomato on 17 July grown as one huge sprawling bush that has flopped out in every direction, its hard green fruit hidden in ones and twos deep inside the canopy, with a dark board-and-batten barn standing behind under flat overcast.Week of 13 JulyBig Boy tomatoes on 17 July, two broad squat globes side by side on one truss, faintly ribbed across the shoulder and pale apple-green with a soft whitish blush at the blossom end, three smaller fruit hanging below them in diffuse bright light.Week of 20 JulyBig Boy tomatoes on 20 July, four or five green globes sitting together with no color break in any of them — the largest matte and pale under a bloom, the two below glossier, darker and flecked pale — in dappled sun cut with deep shade.Week of 20 JulyA Big Boy tomato on 20 July grown self-supporting and up past the netting above it, its growing tips bleached pale yellow-green by hard midday sun while the fruit stays hidden deep in the shade, empty wire cages standing in the sun behind.Week of 20 JulyA Big Boy tomato on 20 July, found through a gap in its own canopy, satin green and faintly ribbed across the shoulder with a paler wash low on the belly and its sepals bent right back over the top, the midday sun broken to hard dapple around it.Week of 3 AugustBig Boy tomatoes on 4 August, four crowded hard against each other on one truss, each a flattened pale apple-green globe faintly banded darker and struck with a single hard white highlight, under sun that lays hard-edged leaf shadows across it.Week of 10 AugustBig Boy tomatoes picked on 12 August, four scarlet globes carrying a matte bloom rather than a shine, each dimpled where the calyx tore away, and a fifth still wholly green with its stem end folded into a rosette of corky scar.Week of 17 AugustA Big Boy truss on 17 August, seven or eight pale apple-green globes weighing the stem down and faintly striped darker across the shoulders, one of them just breaking with its shoulder washed salmon-pink, rain standing on every skin.Week of 24 AugustA Big Boy truss on 26 August carrying eight or more green fruit at every size at once, the two broadest and most deeply ribbed right at the top of the cluster, each held under a green star of calyx on a stem furred white with hair.Week of 14 SeptemberSaved seed pulp on 20 September, a shallow finger-deep layer of crushed red flesh, gel and pale flat seeds in a clear glass bowl under a wrinkled white film dotted with blue-gray and near-black spots. Hard indoor light glares off the wet surface beside a kitchen scale.
