Saturday

So here we are, three weeks down and another weekend has started.  It's been quite a stuffy night and I turned the ceiling fan on after weeks on not needing it.  Yesterday was ditto - lovely and sunny but with a humidity that I really have not missed in the last several weeks.  Even the children were listless.  Mind you, that might be because I have worked them hard over the week.

The tremendous storm I woke up to yesterday lasted for quite a while and, I gather, kept several colleagues and children awake in the early morning.  There were more than a few yawns around the place.  I don't know if we have had another one: as I said, without the hearing aids it wouldn't wake me and I certainly haven't been bothered by lightning.

I should have had guests this weekend, as I said yesterday (I think it was yesterday) but I am thankful that I cancelled.  You can sometimes tell when a difficult decision is the right one, can't you?  In this case the immediate sense of relief was overwhelming.  The work is still there, still has to be done, but I no longer feel that sense of suffocating panic.  It will get done and I may have some time for resting too.

One of the not-school things is dealing with more tomatoes.  The black Indigo Rose tomatoes are now ripening after months on the vine.  I moved them out of the growhouse  after learning that they need to be in direct sunlight and that seems to have done the trick.  The pear shaped tomato plants are now also giving me ripe fruit.  They were quite late in and I did wonder whether I'd get much from them.  The large plum tomato is still going strong although the yellow cherry plum is more or less over now, as is the red cherry.  The beef tomatoes have been most prolific and seem to follow their own rules.  I go with the flow.

Indigo Rose tomatoes (photo borrowed from the internet).  Most of mine have looked like the ones on the left for months (it appears that it takes three months for the fruit to ripen so no wonder I was waiting), but now some are looking more like the ones on the right.

I was excited to see that at last the accidental hundreds and thousands fruits are reddening.  They truly are an extra and while I won't get all that many in the time left, I shall enjoy what I do get as a gift from nature.  With all the blight warnings and the humid weather, blight cannot be that far away and I don't feel I can spray most of the tomatoes any more.  The only ones I haven't treated so far are the accidentals so I might give them a squirt!

Anyway, all that rambling was just to say I have a window ledge full of tomatoes to deal with so I shall make some more passata for the freezer, I think.  That is easy and I can work in between parts of the process.

I was pondering on next year's crop.  It is fun to get different kinds and see what happens but I think I will probably restrict myself to a couple of large plums as this year's plant has been brilliant, maybe a cherry or two and the rest will probably be sungold.  My dad swears by sungold and I agree with him that the flavour is just out of this world.  They are so sweet and so juicy and the skins are not tough in the least.

Aren't they lovely?

Well, after rambling on for ages (see the effect the weekend has?) I'd better stop and do my planning to get it off my mind.  Then I will start off the bread dough - I think I shall make some more soft rolls as they were super.

Have a lovely weekend, wherever you are and whatever you are doing.