What will become apparent the longer you read our posts and check out bits and pieces on our blog is that we are huge fans of Spain. Carl is obsessed by Malaga, I prefer the vibe of Madrid 🙂 On our first trip to Spain together we went for some tea at a local market and we enjoyed this amazing tomato salad. I know that it sounds like such a simple dish which it absolutely is but it was the quality of the tomatoes, the olive oil and the garlic which really elevated the dish and made it so memorable. A few days later when our friends had joined us in Madrid we dragged them to the market and we all sat around enjoying the heavenly salad and drinking the most amazing rose. We started pondering on why tomatoes at home never tasted this good and if we could grow these back in grey London. We decided to take some tomatoes home and extract the seeds and give it a crack. 

The seeds were dried out on some kitchen roll and then planted in an old grape box container and amazingly after a week or so some shoots started to appear. We quickly realised that we had planted the seeds too closely together so after some untangling we ended up with a million little plants and way more than we needed. These were rapidly given away to friends and neighbours until we were left with a manageable number to focus our energy on.

Now, one of our biggest problems is that we have a west facing balcony as Carl has previously mentioned which does make growing plants difficult. Somehow we managed to get the plants growing and at one point the balcony was looking very dodgy (please see attached photos)

Some of the plants started to flower and because we had a lack of bees visiting our balcony Carl had to use an electronic toothbrush to carry out the task of hand pollination which was great to watch! We finally finally got some tomatoes growing but they were minimal and werent getting enough sun to get them really growing. Poor Carl did traipse up to our shared roof terrace to give the plants some sun and although we looked well dodgy getting into the lift with the plants, this was a little bit successful. 

All in all though, it was a real struggle to produce anything so thank goodness we made it to the top of the list for an allotment. This year we’ve had way more success and have been able to grow many different varieties. Already excited for next years trips to Spain and more tomato research 🙂