How I stopped paying $10-12 a kilogram for cherry tomatoes.

This one was accidental. It happens every year. (They self-seed, probably falling off one of last year’s plants and sleeping in the soil all winter before springing into life in spring.)

This specimen grew in a hole about six inches square in the concrete by the fence; once the repository of an old fencepost. Last summer there was a tomato in the old trough close by; this rogue plant was probably an escaped fruit from that, rolling down the slant into the slight depression. 

It grew tall. I couldn't - or didn't bother to - drive a stake into the hole but I tied a kind of restraint on the fence rail around it, like a seat belt. It outgrew that, flopping forward, wanting territory. So after I  considered ripping it out I commuted it to King’s pleasure (archaic legal term), thus anthropomorphising it, and propped its spreading vines over a plastic chair; one of those white stacking ones that cost about $10 at Bunnings. The plant was most appreciative, spreading further and enveloping the chair in a green jungle of vine and spreading outwards and upwards, the latter direction enabled via a kind of pyramidical support from its viney intestinal undergrowth, a green thicket in which lived an animal.

The animal, a possum, was also appreciative. It camped under the chair at night, entering the now-hidden space through a tunnel of vine, a furry eskimo in a green igloo (both latter terms metaphorical figures of speech, not racially- or architecturally-charged language just in case any censorious bureaucrats are reading).

For some reason, the possum did not eat its house, so the thatched igloo slowly, silently continued to thrive from its small hole, its entry into a hidden planet of underground nutrition and some subterranean acquifer its roots had divined. Indeed, its success may have been that, unlike in a normal garden, evaporation was almost eliminated by its prison of three inch thick concrete.

I tore it out in mid-April; halfway to winter. It took two days. It had rolled in on itself trying to find extra footings, and the thicker vines resting on the concrete way down below had grown science fiction-like runners, failed root sprouts like little white feet, the undersides of fat pale centipedes.

But it had fruited. Thousands of uniform cherry tomatoes, in-curling clusters of botanical perfection, mostly green but some orange, yellow, red, gold; as if reflecting the leaves drifting like a slow death down to the lawn in the front garden.

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Six jars of salty-sweet green tomato pickle, and the rest stored in cardboard to reduce moisture before reddening on the kitchen window sill, progressively, to be cut into salads. They’re almost finished, but they made it to June. Happy winter.