Yes I know it’s not a canary exactly, but on the allotment it seems to be bringing a canary style announcement to the coal mine. The tomatoes on our allotment, although they looked OK (with a great deal of watering), and tasted fine even though it has been a much reduced crop, have no seeds; no descendants; no progeny. The canary is lying dead on the bottom of the cage and suggests that although they remained just about alive during the five consecutive heatwaves, they were suffering greatly and couldn’t stand the temperatures. They weren’t the only casualties this season. The legumes either failed altogether or failed to pollinate well. There’s a reason for all this; apparently pollen gets sticky in the heat and doesn’t transfer so easily from plant to plant leaving them seedless.
For a while I thought we’d got the first mutation to seedlessness that ever happened on a tomato but I soon realized that Darwin would have sucked his teeth and shaken his head. If the seed merchants have the same trouble as us, there will be almost no viable tomato seeds next year and the price would go through the roof. I’ve seen internet reports of sunflowers with no seeds, and our own sweetcorn only managed a couple of viable cobs on each plant, and the potatoes were very small and sparse. The newspapers are being told by farmers that this year is the worst cereal season for at least ten years. You can ask what the outcome of all this will be, but you can only answer it by accepting that “the local supermarket” is not the correct answer. We, collectively, created this problem and as sure as eggs is eggs we’re going to have to do something about the way we live if we’re not all going to suffer serious privation when the prices rise and the shelves are empty. The canary is lying dead on the floor and I did the autopsy.
Charlie our neighbour gave us a couple of Sungold F1 cherry tomato plants in late spring and we planted them outside in a raised bed. They got the same watering regime as the ones in the polytunnel but they’ve had no cracking or greenback and the fruit is delicious. The problem is obviously high temperatures but anyone with a very small greenhouse or a polytunnel will know that they’re fiendishly hard to ventilate at night, while at the same time protecting them from the “shoppers” who climb over the gate in the late evening and reap where they haven’t sown.
But one plant which appears to thrive under the heat has had a great year both here in Bath and on the Bannau Brycheiniog, where we were last week. It’s called Fat Hen – Chenopodium album and it’s been a virulent weed in both places. Our friends keep sheep, pigs and hens – all of them free range within their field boundaries. They’ve got internet up there on their hillside and so we were able to discover that Fat Hen is capable of causing harm to animals and humans in spite of being consumed by us and our livestock across Europe and since neolithic times. Tollund Man’s last meal, we’re told, included Fat Hen but that wasn’t what killed him. Back home I turned to the books and worked out that the point at issue is how large a percentage of the diet comprises Fat Hen and how much you (or they) eat at one time. The take-home point is that in a field situation it’s better to cut a small amount and add it to the feed, rather than leaving it growing where the livestock can overdo it. Used in that way it’s apparently high quality food, and the oxalates and nitrates which cause problems are kept at a safe level.
But all this talk of poisonous weeds must have lodged in my mind and a strange dream carried me right back to the tomato family, the Solanaceae which gives us potatoes and tomatoes but also the Nightshades, Henbanes and Thorn apples all three dangerous if not fatal when eaten; and thorn apple, also known in the US as Jimson weed apparently had a loyal following among soldiers during the Civil War. I mentioned only a few days ago a T shirt I saw with the slogan “all plants are edible – some of them only once”. This was a property that was understood and often used by poisoners in the past.
Anyway, in my dream I was leaning against the wall of a pizza hut deep in conversation with one of our son’s ex’s trying to explain that something she was going to cook was extremely poisonous when another young woman turned up looking faintly odd; intoxicated and away somewhere else. She explained to me (with a voice from somewhere else too) that she had been preparing Thornapple for a meal. I begged her not to eat it and she replied that it was fine, because if you sang this song while you cooked it, the poison would be neutralized. Then she uttered this haunting ululating sound – the song – and then nodded as if to say “that showed you!”and wandered off.
Thorn Apple is an intoxicating hallucinogen with severe chance of causing death and whose hallucinations are widely spoken of by people who’ve tried it as horrible so it’s not likely to catch on. But it demonstrates that plants have the ability to synthesize good things and bad. Without them the earth would cease to have life in any form, but they also demand respect. For many years tomatoes were assumed to be poisonous precisely because of their relationship with Deadly Nightshade, Enchanter’s Nightshade and all the others and you have to wonder what brave soul took the risk of eating one and began the huge cultural change that brought the plant to its position as number one home-grown fruit in the UK.
Madame and me were walking one afternoon in Leigh Woods on the Somerset side of Brunel’s Clifton Suspension bridge one day, and a elderly man who looked like a rough sleeper came up to us in a state of breathless excitement and dragged us deep into the woods saying that he’d been living in the woods for (if I remember right) ten years and he’d never seen a Purging Buckthorn there before. I was right at the beginning of my interest in plants and after he showed us the bush, we shook hands and thanked him and went on our way. Purging Buckthorn – Rhamnus cathartica – is another of those plants it’s wise to get to grips with if you’re foraging in the woods. The clue is in both “purging” and “cathartica” if you think about it. A bilingual warning that all plants are edible, some only once.
But to finish on an entirely delicious and safe account of the tomato I’ve put a photo of the Italian dish Panzanella which I made to Anna Del Conte’s recipe but it’s capable of any amount of variation. It was while making this dish that I discovered that the tomatoes I’d harvested that day, had no seeds. Inside every silver lining, these days, there’s a cloud waiting to get out!
