My Best Year of Tomatoes

Introduction

This year, 2026, has been an amazing year for growing tomatoes in my little London garden. We've had five heatwaves reaching the highest temperatures on record (38.1°C or 100.6°F).

I discovered that tomatoes have thrived in our exceptional heat. My experience has corroborated that. I've had taller tomato vines than ever before and more and longer trusses, too. For the first time that I can remember, I've had to climb up a stepladder or on a garden chair to reach the top trusses. Unbelievable!

And this is my first year of dealing with a new pest affecting tomatoes.

The tomatoes

The tomatoes I grew all came from fresh ones bought at our local Farmers' Market. That means I don't know what variety they are, just their colours: red, yellow, orangey-brown, and lime green, all plum-shaped.

What I then found was the orangey-brown tomatoes didn't all come true to colour, so I ended up with two more varieties: a green-pink, one that grew into a spherical cherry tomato and one plum-shaped.

The lime green tomatoes were the best tasting. Yet even amongst them, one vine grew spherical dark green tomatoes. Here's a picture of three of each:

I assure you those dark green ones really are ripe. I kept them on the vine for much longer than expected, but they simply didn't change colour once they'd grown to their maximum size. So, I dared to pick one and taste it, and yes, it was ripe and ready to eat.

Trusses

These are the yellow plum tomatoes with their abundant trusses still in flower:

The yellow plum tomatoes grew to various sizes, some very small but ripe, while others were bigger, like in the main picture. The yellow plum tomatoes in particular have such abundant trusses but even the others have unexpectedly long trusses.

This year has been an especially good year for growing tomatoes. My vines have reached 7 feet (2.13 m) tall, before I needed to pinch them out and stop them growing even taller.

Because it has been so hot this year, we had to resurrect our old irrigation system to ensure the tomato vines in their pots received enough water throughout the day. If tomatoes don't get enough water, they can't access enough calcium, so the tomatoes develop blossom end rot, where the end turns brown and stops growing.

I'd give the vines an organic tomato feed first thing in the morning and the irrigation system on timer did the rest of the work. So, we could leave the house and garden to enjoy the good weather and go out about.

Here's the irrigation system working:

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Pests

It's been my best year of tomatoes, but alas it's also been my worst year for pests. I've never had problems with pests on tomatoes before, other than some whitefly. But this year, I had the prettiest shield bugs come and munch through my tomatoes late in the season. Here's a young one enjoying one of my tomatoes:

Here's a different one at a later stage of maturity on an old tomato leaf:

They look like different insects but they're actually different stages (instars) of the same shield bug, the southern green shield bug (Nezara viridula). It's a non-native species that recently arrived in southern England from the European mainland. They're black to start with, gradually becoming greener as they mature to adulthood.

Very pretty, but I don't like what they've done to my tomatoes!

In England, we have the native common green shield bug, which doesn't cause problems. The difference between them and the non-native one is that the adult of our native common green shield bug has a brown end while the non-native one is almost all green with the faintest patch of light brown at the end. They're easily mistaken for one another, but I'm learning!

Here's an adult of the non-native species without its juvenile spots and colours:

Finally…

Tomato growing isn't going to be the same anymore now that these pests have arrived in my corner of the world. These invasive species are such a pain, munching through perfectly good tomatoes.

Next year is forecast to be another hot one with the El Niño effect being the strongest ever. I'll grow tomatoes again, but this time I'll be checking the underside of leaves for the eggs of the shield bugs to remove them. The recommendation for dealing with the bugs is to collect them in soapy water. That should stop them munching through my tomato crop.

Do you have these pretty pests?

Thank you for reading

People, who've asked to be tagged: Aidan McCarthy Lu Skerdoo