Posted by shiny on February 28, 2026 at 00:00 and edited at September 20, 2026 at 10:40

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If this year's harvest had a main character, it was tomatoes. Here's how it went, roughly day by day.

Waiting

Early January was all impatience. The tomatoes just needed consistent days over 22°C to actually ripen, and Wellington — as Wellington does — wasn't cooperating. "Come on #Wellington" pretty much sums up the mood.

First fruit

  • Jan 11 — today's harvest, the first real one of the season.
  • Jan 22 — the first black krim tomatoes, and honestly, probably could have waited a bit longer on those.
  • Feb 1 — one kamokamo and about 3kg of tomato. The kind of harvest photo where you can see the season is about to turn.

The daily grind

Once it started, it didn't really stop:

  • Feb 4 — dug up some spuds, made saag aloo. A meal that was 100% grown at home, except the rice.
  • Feb 10 — "one day of harvest in my highly illegal nz vege garden."
  • Feb 12 — another day of harvest, filling a 25L pot. Sauce-making weekend, clearly.
  • Feb 13 — just under 10kg of tomatoes in a single day. Another batch of sauce started.
  • Feb 14 — up since 6am securing the vege garden from a storm, harvesting anything that looked ready before it got hammered.
  • Feb 21 — down to about 5kg a day instead of the usual 15kg/day, which tells you how hard the peak actually was. Sunset harvests, canning every night, barely keeping up with the bottling.
  • Feb 22 — 100% of that batch's canning jars sealed. Small win, big relief.
  • Feb 26 — the tally: a little under 100kg of tomatoes from the garden so far, at roughly 5–8kg a day for about three weeks. At $12/kg, that's about $1,200 worth of tomatoes, grown from what started as a couple of dollars' worth of seed.

Slowing, not stopping

By late February the harvest had eased off but hadn't quit — "slowed down but had not stopped" — and by March there were still tomatoes coming in, still getting canned, still turning into sauce, paste, and whatever else the larder needed.

Months later, in June, I was still sharing that same glut of heirloom tomatoes with friends and neighbours — some of whom asked, genuinely, if oddly-shaped tomatoes were "safe to eat like that." Which says a lot about what a year of only ever seeing supermarket fruit does to people.

Next up: the pumpkins, the kumara, and pressing this year's cider.

Photos: tomatoes ripening (Jan 8), today's harvest (Jan 11), first black krim (Jan 22), kamokamo + tomato (Feb 1), saag aloo spuds (Feb 4), the "illegal" garden haul (Feb 10), 25L pot (Feb 12), 10kg day (Feb 13), storm harvest (Feb 14), sunset harvest (Feb 21), sealed jars (Feb 22), the slowdown (Feb 26).