Tomatoes can be a hot topic in this part of the world. This year, though, the edge has been taken off the high excitement that usually surrounds their harvest. 

There are dozens of people around here who grow their own tomatoes but this Summer we didn’t have the opportunity to compare notes. Right at the time when we should have been boasting about our anticipated crop yields, we were consumed by the bushfire emergency.

It’s not only country Victorians who are obsessed with their tomatoes in Summer. I once met a doctor who’d lived in the central west of New South Wales, where the climate is similar to ours. She said that every year she and her MD colleagues, as well as the town’s dentist and the vet, would lay bets on which of them would produce the first, perfectly ripe, home-grown tomato.

We harvested some magnificently ripe and tasty Green Zebras, Black Russians and Tommy Toes in March, enough to see us through a couple of weeks. The rest of the crop was left to ripen further and although that failed to happen, yesterday we picked them.

Our hand-wringing and chest beating over their failure to ripen continues apace, with various theories about the causes floated, but none yet attributed. 

We’d have left the unripe toms a little longer but we were spooked into picking after yesterday morning’s heavy frost and the coldest April morning across Victoria in over five decades.

We harvested at least six kilos, with only a few showing splits and possum-sized bites, despite the crop having been carefully netted. Hopefully some of the fruit will still be okay to make chutney, relish, fried green tomatoes and possibly even a green tomato cake. 

True confession time: during our rather sheltered lives, neither my partner nor I has ever attempted to make anything with green tomatoes, although we did once sample some fried green tomatoes, served to us by friends. They were delicious.

Before deciding which tomatoes to use for a variety of purposes, we’ll have to scrutinise them closely and discard any that look as if they might have succumbed to frost damage. Fortunately, the Oregon State University Extension Service has some useful tips on how to separate the duds from the goods.

After reading what the OSU site has to say, I’ve discovered that we’ve stored our tomatoes in completely the wrong way and I’ll now have to spend a good part of the day filing them properly.

Guess what I’ll be counting before I fall asleep tonight.