Finding a tomato plant in one’s back garden is a nice surprise in Spain.

The other day I found a tomato plant growing in my back garden. Not that I’d lost it but I certainly hadn’t planted it.

Gardeners out there will no doubt think it very peculiar to just come across something like this. But I’m not a gardener. I’m very happy to sit in the garden but anything else is a huge chore.

My garden, like most gardens here consists of black ‘picon’. These are small black volcanic pebbles, very hard on the feet. And of course  ‘green’ spaces’ are actually ‘black spaces’.

Coming from a country where there at least ‘40 shades of green’, this takes a bit of getting used to. The way I see it, gardens are green, with grass that has to be cut on a very regular basis or you can make haystacks.

Grass of a kind will grow here – and the ever-increasing number of golf curses proves the point - but it takes a huge amount of watering. And water here is expensive. I didn’t know until recently that there is one area, Betancuria, where there’s natural water. Every other drop has to be desalinated.

Which is why you can’t drink the water here, we have to buy bottled all the time. So if you want things to grow, as in flowers or plants, you really need to have an irrigation scheme. Otherwise, you’re out with the garden hose every evening.

Most of us live with the black pebbles, at least until we can afford to get rid of it.

Some of my neighbours have done wonderful jobs, tiling the space.

I’ve been to a ‘Garden Party’, which was to show off my neighbour’s new garden. It was fabulous, with gorgeous tiles, a raised flowerbed, and even the workings for the pool nicely hidden with plants.

Another option is to put artificial grass down. I haven’t looked into the cost of this but I rather fancy the idea. A nice bit of green around the pool or to walk on to get to the washing machine (I have an outdoor utility room, with a plastic roof covering) would be good. I have a couple of brochures about this but like everything else, it depends on price.

So far, I have done nothing in the back garden. In my defence, I have planted some flowers in the small space in front of the house and, very surprisingly, they grow. I had to get extremely detailed instructions from the nice Welshman who owns the garden centre about planting them, what compost to use, how deep to dig and so on.

But they ARE flourishing. Well, three out of four isn’t too bad, is it? I throw water on them when I think of it so it’s probably true to say they grow, despite my efforts to kill them.

But while it takes (me) a huge amount of effort to grow a few flowers, weeds flourish. They seem to have tentacle roots, burrowing deep down to find whatever bit of soil there is under the picon. And I realised recently that my back garden was full of them. I kept putting off doing anything about them.

But finally the day came when I forced myself to tackle them. Armed with a trusty plastic spade (the kind you use for on the beach to make sandcastles), I made a foray out the back.  Some of these weeds, the ones close to the fencing, were a couple of feet tall. So it took a lot of hacking and digging to remove them.

But imagine my surprise when nestling among the weeds, I found a tomato plant, with six green tomatoes. I also found another three just sitting on the ground and I’ve put these in the sun, in the hope they might ripen.

I’m watering the plant, but not really hoping for very much. I presume the seeds blew in on the wind, as there definitely were no tomatoes there last year.

And to the best of my knowledge, none of my neighbours grow tomatoes. The nearest plants, so I’ve been told are in Corralejo, some three kilometres away.

I have a Plan B. If they don’t ripen, I could, I suppose, rustle up a bit of green tomato chutney.