Tomato plants Ildi and supersweet 100

Clearly these are not from this, otherwise my tomato plants would be seriously overachieving, but this is what I am hoping to emulate again 

It may sound surprising considering the wealth of beautifully flowering plants there are in the world, but tomatoes are one of my favourite plants.  They completely take me back to my childhood when my granddad had a whole greenhouse exclusively for the growing of tomatoes.  Oh those were the days.  He even had a deckchair in there to read the paper in the glorious warmth.

My tomatoes are not so lucky, instead slumming it on the patio, which to be fair, is pretty sheltered and toasty and we do alright by them.  Can't say we were inundated last year but then I had to put them in a shady corner for a good month of the year because of the roof requiring work which no doubt had an impact on production.

Buying my tomato plants is one of the big moments of my gardening year.  I love it.  I always seem to go back to the same place to get my plants, part of the tradition I guess, but this year a few extra cheeky plants have snuck in to the mix from other sources.

The mother plays a lot of badminton, and at one of these sporting gatherings that she goes to one of the men turned up with a whole host of tomato plants.  The mother knows I am not overly fond of yellow tomatoes, it just seems wrong, tomatoes should be red.  This man seemed to have an exclusively yellow  ones, as you do.  However the mother shares my 'what the hell' attitude as they were only cheap and bought two to spice up our tomato lives.

I can't wait to have a constant steady supply of these all summer

And of course once she had broken that tomato plant seal she couldn't help but pick up another she spied outside a local greengrocers the same week.  I have had all three plants for just over a month now, quite early in my eyes, but I have potted them up and they are romping away.

The last tomatoes to come from an unexpected source appeared via the father.  Evidently word has got round that I am in the market for tomatoes as everybody is bringing them home!  A lady turned up at his work with teeny tiny tomato seedlings which she was hoping people would have as she had too many.  How it is possible to have too many I don't know.  So we took a couple of pots off her hands.  They were far far too tiny to go outside so these are currently residing in the garage.  A couple have died as seedlings tend to do, but I should get a few out of it.  Only problem is I don't know the variety again.  Oh tomato surprises.

My first three plants all potted up and raring to go! Two Ildi and one Supersweet 100

And finally to the ones I have grown myself.  i have never attempted to grow tomatoes from seed.  The great man that was my grandfather always bought plants and I figure he knew best.  From the results of my first attempt I now have evidence to prove that he did.  I won a packet of losetto tomato seed from the UK gardening programme Gardener's World which was giving them away so that viewers could join the presenter Monty in 'growing together' tomatoes apparently resistant to blight.  They were also apparently resistant to growing because not one seed germinated. I always think that if not even one seed was willing than you have dodgy seed.  I haven't entirely given up on them, but I think `i probably should.

So there we have it, three plants and potentially more to come and I haven't even started on my garden centre purchases, and there are an awful lot of them!  But I will leave that for another time.