SUN-RIPENED SHELF-READY

From the Andes to your allotment, tomatoes have come a long way – and Rob Smith shows you how to make the most of them

- Robv Smith

When it comes to one of the veggies (technically a fruit) that I love to grow for preserving, tomatoes are at the top of my list! There are so many different types of tomatoes, with different flavours and uses, but it wasn't always that way. Tomatoes can be traced back to the high valleys of the Andes, where wild relatives still sprawl among volcanic rocks.

Indigenous farmers carried seeds north to Mexico and developed larger, more flavoursome fruit. Spanish ships then ferried the seeds to Europe early in the 16th century. Southern Mediterranean cooks soon embraced this new fruit. But in Britain the plant's nightshade-shaped leaves looked rather too close to the deadly belladonna for comfort, and for two centuries the clusters of red and gold spheres grew mainly as exotic curiosities in physic gardens. Then steam trains and glasshouses changed everything, and by the middle of the Victorian period British growers could warm glasshouses with inexpensive coal and deliver ripe tomatoes to urban markets within hours. By the 1930s, allotment guides were advising newcomers to start each season with a packet of tomato seed. Sadly, today's modern consumer appetite knows no seasonality. Supermarkets import fruit year-round, yet any gardener who has bitten into a home-grown tomato on a sunny afternoon knows the difference that daylight, soil, and patience make to flavour. There is no comparison - you have to grow your own!

Though you'll find hundreds of varieties listed in catalogues and in garden centres, you have to think about what you want to use your tomatoes for. They are like potatoes - after all, you wouldn't use new potatoes for mash, or waxy spuds for chips. The same goes for tomatoes. You wouldn't use sweet cherries for a soup (unless you wanted it watery and sweet), and you wouldn't put plum types in a salad (as they are more savoury-flavoured when uncooked).