A novella in 30 chapters

Stingaree Bay: Chapter 11

Green Tomatoes

Soft fresh leaves underfoot, the fruity, spicy tang of crushed tomato foliage as she made her way between the tall vines.

Smells are always more intense in the dark.

Her boots crunched through little drifts of hail still unmelted on the damp ground, shuffled fallen fruit aside.

The pumpkins had copped it big time, the large parasol leaves shot holed or broken.

As far as she could see, the polytunnel was intact. Slightly askew, maybe? Ah, but then — her torch shone on a gaping rent in the solarweave.

Loz was momentarily impressed with the evidence of the storm’s violence. That woven plastic was pretty much indestructible.

The eggplant and capsicum bushes within looked a little windblown, but otherwise fine.

She found Cristóbal at the bush tomato patch. It was flattened, a mat of crushed leaves and stalks. The young Chilean was picking gingerly through the detritus.

‘How’s it looking? Very bad?’

‘No good,’ he stood up, clutching a handful of pink oblong fruit. ‘I’m very sorry, Loreta. Lo siento mucho.’

‘Don’t worry, hun,’ she tried to keep her voice level, without tremor. ‘As soon as it gets properly light, we have to pick what we can.’

She glanced at the eastern sky, already a pale, washed out blue, white at the horizon, foretelling the dawn.

A busy shadow in gumboots, Sophie clattered and clumped around the shipping container tool shed, preparing wheelbarrows, secateurs and long-handled loppers.

By eight o’clock, the sun was high in the clear blue sky and they had a full assessment of the damage.

All of the Roma tomato plants were broken and had to come out. About a quarter of the fruit, already ripe, was trashed, broken and needed to be composted. Half was pockmarked by hail or otherwise lightly damaged, the rest, mostly the greener, harder fruit, was intact.

The big, pear-shaped Amish Paste, a beautiful juicy cooking tomato with a rich taste and a smooth delicate skin, had fared even worse, even though most of the fruit was hard and green. The tall vines had received the full force of the hailstones, some of them marble-sized, driven by hurricane force gusts.

At least half of the fruit lay on the ground.

By eleven they had been working for five hours non-stop, and Loz called a coffee break, handed round a packet of biscuits in lieu of breakfast.

They sat on upended buckets in the barn, contemplating the fruit on the tarps, triaged into three piles for each variety: sound ripe or nearly ripe, sound green or with a blush, damaged but salvageable. Along one wall, whole tomato bushes hung upside-down from the rafters; their green fruit would ripen naturally as the plants slowly withered.

A crunch of tyres on gravel announced Nigel’s arrival. Moments later, his long, spare form appeared in the doorway. ‘Sorry, I couldn’t get here earlier. Emergency call-out. How’s it looking, love?’

‘Well, it could be worse, but it could have been a hell of a lot better. We’ve lost about sixty kilos of ripe tomatoes.’

‘Oh shit.’

‘Quite. We’ll still have enough Romas for bottling, and a few Amish for sauce. But what the hell to do with all this green fruit, I just don’t know. A lot of it is too green to ripen, and with the skin damage, it will probably rot soon. This was going to be a good cash crop, and now look at it …’ her voice quavered for the first time that morning.

‘Salsa verde,’ suggested Cristóbal. ‘Mi yaya, grandma, she makes a good salsa verde, very delicious. With tomatoes, not tomatillos, olive oil and garlic. Chili.’

’Nice one, mate.’ Nigel turned to Loz. ‘What do you reckon? Extra labour, of course, but it will sell for more than raw fruit. It will keep a lot longer, too.’

‘But we don’t have a licensed kitchen,’ objected Loz. ‘You can’t prepare cooked food for sale just anywhere.’

Nigel considered this. ‘What about Anna’s café? That’s got a commercial kitchen.’

‘But she needs it to run her business, hun.’

‘Not today she doesn’t. The café doesn’t open on Mondays. I’ll get on to her now.’

‘It will be a hell of a lot of work. We need at least a hundred new jars. This afternoon.’

It just wasn’t like Loz to be this defeated.

‘No probs,’ said Nigel, brightly. ‘My offsider, Bazza, keeps bees. He has pallets of jars stacked in his shed for his honey. I reckon he can spare some. I’ll get on to him, too.’

‘Okay, hun. Thank you.’ A brave smile at last.

‘Yaya’s Salsa Verde,’ mused Nigel. ‘It has a ring to it. Gotta be worth … oh, twenty bucks a jar, of anyone’s money!’

Loz laughed. ‘You’re paying way too much for your salsa, Nige. Nine ninety-five, I reckon, for a half-kilo jar.’

‘Local-grown, organic tomatoes? Don’t sell yourself short, girl …’

‘Okay, make it fourteen ninety-five?’

‘Now you’re talking!’

Thank you for reading! Next week in Stingaree Bay:

Chapter 12: Rhymes with ‘Verde’

In Anna’s kitchen, it’s going up tonight.

All chapters of Stingaree Bay will appear in this list when published.