Page 37 - Simply Vegetables Autumn 2021

Tomatoes potted up
Tomatoes
A couple of NVS members kindly gifted us a few new varieties of tomato seeds for 2021. In fact, with those and the old favourites that we wanted to grow again, we ended up with 15 different varieties in total!
Amongst our favourites of these varieties were Pink Honeymoon, Shimmer and Atylade. First up we have the Pink Honeymoon, whose blurb describes it as “Pink fruits which are fleshy, sweet and have an explosion of flavour unlike
any other tomato we have tasted.” And they did not lie! This has
fast become one of our favourite varieties of tomato to eat. Delicious both raw and grilled – and pretty large fruits too so there’s plenty of that great taste to tuck in to! Next up we have Shimmer which we really
Pink Honeymoon
like as it is an interesting shape
and colour. As you can see from
the photo, the fruits are a sort of plum-come-teardrop shape and the striped finish when they’re ripe is just so good to see! And last up we have Atylade. We had previously grown Olivade, a large plum shaped tomato which is super tasty and Atylade is its sister variety. Both of equally delicious and very heavy cropping, so I think we’ll have
to continue growing both going forward.
Atylade
Shimmer
Salt and Pepper
but it refused to do anything
but throw side shoots or male flowers. Needless to say, I did a
bit of reading up on it in the end (definitely should’ve done this at the start!) and found out that it’s more of a vine-type plant. And shock horror – as soon as we pinched its top out and let a side shoot grow, there we had our first cucumber!
If we were to try it again, we would grow it up a trellis or similar rather than up a single cane like we would usually grow our cucumbers so we can leave all its side shoots on.
And despite slightly odd appearances, both tasted very nice with soft, edible skins too.
Striped Armenian
Simply Vegetables 37