It's all about tomatoes… Images from Sydney's third annual tomato festival
IT'S ALL ABOUT TOMATOES… the rainy morning had cleared by midday and Sydney people took advantage of what turned out to be a hot, humid and sticky February summer day to make their way to the third annual Tomato Festival Sydney in The Royal Botanic Garden.
There, close to the waters of Sydney Harbour at Farm Cove, they viewed and tasted a huge range of tomatoes and other plants of the Solanaceae family such as potato and chilli. There were demonstrations of preserving, bottling, bushfoods and more, food made with tomato recipes ready to eat and deckchairs and tables in the shade of a big tree where you could escape the day's sweaty heat and cool down, chilled beer in hand.
Here's where it started…
Farm Cove is an appropriate location for the tomato festival because it was where farming started in Australia with the arrival of the First Fleet of convicts and their guards in 1788. But they were not the first to extract a harvest from that shore. For perhaps 35,000 years before their sailing vessels anchored in what would become Sydney Harbour, Australian Aboriginals had harvested fish and shellfish from the waters, vegetable and animal foods from the immediate hinterland.
Farming would not last at Farm Cove. Not only were the European farming methods they brought inappropriate to local climate and conditions, the sandy soil of the Cove lacked plant nutrients. Not long after the first attempt at farming, the settlers packed up and took farming to the better clay soils of what is now western Sydney. Now, only the name remains by the Harbour's rippling waters.
Following are my images from the February 2016 Tomato Festival Sydney…
Look, sure… but taste too…
The agricultural biodiversIty of the humble tomatO is quite amazing…
Colour, pattern, shape, size, texture, taste… the characteristics of the range of the tomatoes on display amply demonstrated the diversity of this most useful of crops.
The diversity of our tomatoes not only gives the cooks among us a wealth of flavours to work with, it is also a part of the agricultural biodiversity that sustains humanity. In doing this, agricultural biodiversity takes on an importance equal to the biodiversity of natural ecosystems.
for the home kitchen hacker, there's the opportunity to eat tomatoes well into their off-season by preserving and bottling them… it's sort of like DIY chemistry in Your own KITCHEN…
tasty treats and stallholders…
Tomato Festival Sydney… see you there next year.
Photos and story by Russ Grayson