The summer of 2024
In these last weeks of 2024, we take time to reflect on the past Forever Summer growing season. We can still taste the memories of this summer. From the last harvest of green tomatoes, we made tomato chutney. This way, we stay in touch with this year’s stories and experiences through our taste buds. And what a summer it was!
With lots of rain, phytophthora was constantly lurking, several tomatoes got blossom end rot and we had a relatively small harvest compared to other years. There were also many snails spotted by the community. From that perspective, this year could be labeled as a challenging growing season. But how do you actually quantify a growing season?
With Forever Summer, we ‘harvest’ so much more than just tomatoes! We are building relationships with our environment and each other and exploring what the tomato has to say. Through the tomato community Whatsapp group, there was all kinds of support and ideas from the community to sprinkle extra chalk powder against nose rot. We visited the impressive tomato festival and tomato network in Mime van der Weerden’s backyard. At the Van Abbe, the staff took insanely good care of the tomatoes.
The tomatoes here grew many times better than in our own garden! Many observations were also recorded in the logbooks. Multi-coloured tomato Brad’s Atomic Grape proved to be successful as did the yellow Yellow Pear mini tomatoes. The green variety Beryl Dwarf Beauty was also noted as good growing tomato. And similar to our experiences from previous editions of Forever Summer, the blue tomatoes withstood changeable weather very well.
