Photographs of this planting through the 2026 season, oldest first.
The photographs
Week of 8 JuneTwo Delicious tomatoes on 14 June, both drawn up so far that their lower stems are bare and the foliage bunches at the top, several bottom leaves already shed, waiting on a garden cart in a storeroom under cool diffuse light.Week of 8 JuneA young Delicious tomato on 14 June, its compound leaves tucking small extra leaflets in between each pair of jagged-toothed ones and one side shoot already sprawling at soil level, indoors under dim light below a shelf of household bottles.Week of 22 JuneA Delicious tomato on 25 June, leggy and thin-leaved, one hairy truss carrying two open yellow stars with their petals folded right back from the fused anther cone, a shriveled brown flower and two closed buds on the same stalk.Week of 20 JulyA Delicious tomato on 20 July, wider than it is tall and fluted by broad furrows running off the calyx, dark green over the shoulders and paling to yellow-green on the belly with darker wedges between, hard leaf shadows cutting across the whole fruit.Week of 3 AugustA Delicious tomato on 6 August, wider than it is tall and ribbed into a dozen rounded lobes with a puckered irregular shoulder and faint corky scar lines across its face, a hand entering the frame to hold the stem aside in midday sun.Week of 3 AugustDelicious tomatoes on 6 August, eight of them hanging in twos and threes down the row, every one ribbed into rounded lobes with a puckered shoulder, and set down on the grass below them a round wooden-rimmed screen of fine pink-lavender mesh.Week of 17 AugustDelicious tomatoes on 21 August, two hanging together from one truss — big flattened globes, matte-skinned and faintly ribbed at the top, darker green across the shoulder — with rows of the same plant receding out of focus in the wet overcast.Week of 17 AugustOne Delicious beefsteak on 21 August, pale apple-green going yellower toward the blossom end and perfectly beaded with rain, a short healed pink scar across its upper shoulder, and beside it one so deeply pleated its shoulder is lobed, not round.Week of 17 AugustFour Delicious beefsteaks on 21 August, all still green and all deeply pleated, fine tan corky lines following the bottom of every pleat like healed seams, and rain standing on the smooth skin between them in flat overcast light.Week of 17 AugustA Delicious tomato on 21 August grown as several fruit fused into one — a deep cleft dividing a broad upper lobe from two swollen lobes below, a corky brown scar running along its floor and rust-colored seams crossing the shoulder above.Week of 31 AugustFive or six Delicious tomatoes on 31 August, all of them still pale green and shallowly ribbed across the shoulders, the broadest already flattening out, held on hairy trusses under foliage spotted and holed above them.Week of 31 AugustDelicious tomatoes brought indoors on 2 September, five of them heavily ribbed and flattened and still green but for a faint bronze on some shoulders, laid wet on a cloth under warm light beside a jug of dark blue berries.
