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Growing Mondays: Tomatoes as Teachers
Don't give up too early.
Jo Hunter Adams
December 15, 2025
Hi! I'm Jo, writing from Heart & Soil homestead, a 1-acre homestead in the Far South of Cape Town, South Africa. Every week I share inspiration and education for your growing journey. Thanks so much for reading!
Welcome to Growing Mondays, where I talk about growing- vegetables, fruits, animals and, well, people. This week I talk about tomatoes, pride, shame, and keeping growing.
At the beginning of the year I dreamt of bananas all along the polytunnel, to collect the run-off from the tunnel and gradually change the micro-ecosystem. Now, at the end of the year, there’s about 10 bananas growing, and it gives me a lot of joy to see them.
The roots of ultimate insights are found … on the level of wonder and radical amazement, in the depth of awe, in our sensitivity to the mystery.
I take a lot of pride in our tomato growing. For the past few years, I’ve been able to focus on heirlooms and save many varieties of seed. Eugene and I have made hundreds of litres of passata (tomato sauce) for our family each summer.
The flip side of excessive pride is shame when things don’t go to plan.
And this year, things didn’t grow to plan. We had a difficult spring, and I kept starting my precious heirloom seed, then not following through with the care needed to get the tomatoes settled in the beds. We were not managing routine maintenance, and when I finally got enough tomatoes seedlings into the beds, it was much later than normal, and pests were already starting to multiply.
I call these “Diane’s tomatoes” because Diane is the origin story. The origin story has been important enough for to make sure that I grow some and sell some “Diane’s tomato” seedlings each year. Having these special origin stories is a type of safety net for me.
But we were still overstretched. So things started to compound. Later planting + more pests + limited pruning = MORE pests PLUS disease.
This led me into a shame cycle. I just couldn’t face the tomatoes head on. It was too embarrassing for me to look at the plants, remove all the diseased tomatoes, the diseased leaves, the pests. So I avoided them, and the tomatoes kept deteriorating.
3rd gen black icicle (some crossing so a little less black)
I couldn’t get out of the shame cycle that came from looking at my tomatoes head on. So I approached the problem indirectly
While I avoided all the plants struggling in the beds, I grew out a 300 plug tray of Roma tomatoes, which I find fairly disease/pest resistant. It only takes about 10 minutes to seed a tray with our daughter, Hana. I knew I could handle that much, find that much time. Then I transplanted them into 2 and 4kg bags, buying myself some time. I would have them to plant in gaps as other crops (Cauliflower, onions) were harvested.
I asked for help with pruning diseased leaves, removing rotten tomatoes. I couldn’t face doing this myself, but I knew someone who could. While I can’t fix the proportion of harvest already lost, I can face the tomatoes again, and give them the care needed.
As an unexpected twist, a friend of our farm found herself traveling overseas mid-season, and brought her heirloom tomato seedlings for me to save seed for her, so our rare heirloom dreams for the year are still in play.
Can you spot the chameleon? Our cucumber season has been going well, as they are a bit more forgiving of neglect.
I see this as a story of systems and safety nets that save us from ourselves. I’m still not sure how our tomato season will go, but I’m no longer avoiding anything. I can look at my tomatoes head on and learn from the mistakes of this season.
It’s ok to be incompetent, busy or inattentive sometimes. I can fail to provide the environment for our plants to thrive. And then, I need to find our way back.
Finding my way back doesn’t necessarily mean achieving our hundreds of bottles of passata, or selling a certain volume of something. It just means returning to a place where I’m confident that I’m doing what I can to provide my plants with the conditions they need to thrive.
Top Tomato tips:
Tomatoes DO grow easily from seed, in the sense that they love being transplanted, and they can grow in relatively high-nutrient, dense soil. The #1 system to set in place is water (either an alert, a note in your calendar, or an automated system). It’s also easy to save seed. So you can grow heirlooms!
Early intervention- pruning of diseased leaves, physical removal of pests, ensuring good airflow- is key to a good harvest.
Tomatoes are prone to fungal disease (see above on airflow), so don’t let humidity get too high by watering from above. Drip irrigate, or water at root level.
In Cape Town, and in most of South Africa, we have a long tomato season. If at first you fail, try again that same season. Life’s too short to waste a season for learning. You can always find affordable tomato seed and seedlings.
How is your season going? What do you need to do face certain plants, given the constraints on your time and energy?
Peppers and basil are also progressing well, and I’m wondering if this will be an opportunity to spend more of the season freezing pesto and eating more fresh tomatoes. Usually I get so caught up in the urgency of processing tomatoes that we don’t savour them. This may be the year for savouring, as we’ll likely have a much slower harvest for a while.
Workshops
Some 2026 workshops: |
We offer homes to female guinea pigs only, but occasionally one arrives pregnant, and we get the glorious pleasure of spending time with a baby guinea pig.
Gratitude is strongest, clearest, most robust, and radical when things are really hard.
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