Photographs of this planting through the 2026 season, oldest first.
The photographs
Week of 8 JuneA San Marzano Roma on 13 June carrying one green fruit already twice as long as it is wide and blunt at the end, a yellow flower open on the truss beside it and the big leaf below peppered with small round holes chewed clean through, in dappled sun.Week of 15 JuneA San Marzano Roma on 19 June, deep in the canopy, one oblong green fruit with the shriveled flower still stuck to its blossom end and a hairy calyx clasping the shoulder, a second only just setting behind a collapsed yellow rag of petals.Week of 22 JuneA San Marzano Roma tomato on 25 June, squared off at the blossom end and an even pale green except at the tip, where it is just going yellow, hung from a stout hairy stalk with the sun hard on one flank and the rest of the plant in shade.Week of 29 JuneA San Marzano Roma tomato on 29 June, two smooth green ovals hanging together on one short stalk and mottled darker toward the shoulder, set back far enough inside the plant that the backlit leaves around them read sharper than the fruit.Week of 29 JuneA San Marzano Roma tomato on 29 June, twice as long as it is wide with squared shoulders and a deeper green band laid across its middle, the sepals curving back over the top, hanging in warm low light among leaves streaked and holed.Week of 29 JuneA San Marzano Roma tomato on 29 June, pale green and blunt-ended with the dried brown flower still stuck to its nose inside a white-furred calyx, water beading along the hairy stalk in hard direct sun and the woodland behind dissolved.Week of 6 JulySan Marzano Roma tomatoes on 7 July, half a dozen blocky-oval fruit hanging green with a faint darker stripe running down the length of each, one still holding its shriveled flower, on bristly stalks under sepals curled hard back.Week of 6 JulyA San Marzano Roma tomato on 7 July, the biggest fruit on it drawn out cylindrical and finished with a small pointed nipple at the blossom end, faint pale striping running its length under sepals curled back over the shoulder.Week of 6 JulyA San Marzano Roma tomato on 7 July gone tall and pale, its stems arching over bare and whippy at the top, half a dozen blocky green ovals hanging at different sizes below, and the leaves deep inside the canopy drying brown in flat light.Week of 13 JulySan Marzano Roma tomatoes on 17 July, ten or more still green in clusters right through the canopy, each an elongated oval carrying faint paler stripes down its length, on a sprawling plant set against deep blue sky and white cloud.Week of 20 JulySan Marzano Roma tomatoes on 20 July, squared-sided cylinders each tipped with a small nipple, and one has lost its whole blossom end to a sunken circle of near-black leathery skin ringed with bleached cream while the fruit beside it is untouched.Week of 20 JulyA San Marzano Roma on 23 July, glimpsed deep in a lattice of its own stems — the body already deep orange-red with the shoulder still yellow-green under the calyx, the stems around it furred white and studded with knobby tan corky bumps.Week of 20 JulyA San Marzano Roma picked on 23 July and set down on a laptop palm rest, ripening three ways at once, a greenish-yellow cap at the shoulders, clear orange down one side and a translucent pink flush across the other, meeting with no line between.Week of 3 AugustEight San Marzano Roma tomatoes laid out on 3 August, three ripe and five still green, two of the green ones carrying healed corky zipper scars in ragged lines across the shoulder and one flank going gold, on checked cotton beside a cooktop grate.Week of 7 SeptemberA San Marzano Roma tomato hanging alone on an overcast 11 September, turning from the shoulders down — golden yellow-orange across the top, fading to yellow-green, green blotches left at the blossom end — its hairy stalk bent at a sharp knee above the calyx.
