| This year, our family grew several kinds of tomatoes: Glacier (our extra-early variety), Matt's Wild Cherry (an early cherry), Brandywine, Eva Purple Ball, Green Zebra, Sungold (a hybrid cherry), and Romas (for canning). We also had an unusually cool weather with only a few miserably hot weeks. The tomatoes took their sweet time ripening.
First came the Glaciers and the Matt's. The Glacier's were delicious and at first they were a decent size. Later in the season they were only as big as cherry tomatoes. The Matt's were tasty but TINY. Usually I pick them and pop them right in my mouth, because they are so little, they aren't even worth carrying inside. Lately, I don't even bother picking them. They are that small. Why bother.
Then came the Green Zebras and the Sungolds. The Sungolds have been GREAT. That plant has produced and produced and produced. It's been consistent all summer, with LOTS of tomatoes. Often the plant will have a vine that looks like the picture below, with several tomatoes that come ripe one at a time.
Sungolds
The Green Zebras produced, but slowly and one at a time. Sometimes the tomatoes seem to go from unripe to rotten without stopping at ripe. Nonetheless, this was my boyfriend's favorite tomato of the ones we grew, based on the taste. Guess we'll have to grow more next year!
Here was one of our first tomato harvests:
Glaciers (large red), Matt's (small red), Sungold (gold), and one Green Zebra.
Much later in the season, we had a weeklong hot spell, and then the brandywine started producing. Finally! It spent most of the summer just sitting there full of green tomatoes! The romas really haven't done much at all, and the last plant died. The plant that's turned out to be a brandywine is one that I labeled Eva Purple Ball. So the plant that died is labeled Brandywine, but perhaps that's the Eva?
Here's a later harvest, once the Brandywine got going and right before the Glacier started to produce only teeny tiny tomatoes. These tomatoes ended up diced and mixed with basil from our garden, Celtic sea salt, and extra virgin olive oil from a farmers' market in Bakersfield.
Our first decent sized tomato harvest
Brandywine (pink), Glacier (round red), one Roma (oblong red), Green Zebra (yellow/green), and Sungold (gold)
I also tried my hand at seed saving for tomatoes. Turns out tomatoes don't cross-pollinate one another too much, so as long as you've got an open pollinated variety (and mine were, except for the Sungold, I think), you can save seeds. The only catch is that you have to ferment them.
Here's how: First, cut out all of the juicy stuff in the middle of the tomato with the seeds in it and put it all into a cup. Let the cup sit somewhere where your boyfriend won't mistake it as a dirty dish and wash it. Don't put it in direct sunlight. Wait until you've got a nice layer of mold covering the top of the tomato pulp and seeds, like in the pic below:
Fermented Green Zebra tomato seeds, covered in mold
Now add water (about the same amount of water as you've got seeds), and pour the whole thing through a strainer. You'll end up with just seeds, no mold. Then dry the seeds. Once the seeds are dry, store them in a glass jar or plastic bag or somewhere where you can keep them dry.
Tomato seeds, dry and ready to save
Mid-summer, the squash plant I referred to as "the squash that ate my yard" finally died. We were all happy to see it go. It produced about 10 lovely, huge, delicious winter squashes for us, but it was a nuisance of a plant because it was so big and it was into everything. It took over trees, paths, and even the compost pile. After it died, I put the entire vine into the compost. There was so much biomass in that vine, adding it to the pile practically doubled the size of the pile. Here's a pic:
Compost with the squash vine in it
With the enormous squash plant finally gone, I could check and see what happened to our potatoes. We had huge flourishing potato plants which were first eaten by bugs and then covered by the huge squash vine. Between that and me trying to add dirt to them so they'd produce more potatoes, they died. Only, the squash vine was so large and unruly that I couldn't get in there to see if they produced any potatoes. With the squash gone, I started digging around with a pitchfork (the WRONG tool to use if you're digging up potatoes!) and I found a great surprise:
Potato harvest!
This turned into a lovely mashed potato dinner (or two), and our kids even ate it (and liked it!). Last week I made mashed potatoes from store-bought potatoes and our older daughter told me she only wanted to eat OUR potatoes that we grew. Good girl! Only, we don't have any more. We're waiting for the next batch of potatoes to sprout so we can start again for a winter crop.
There's more going on in the garden, but I don't have more pictures. I just planted a banana tree and a passionfruit vine, and hopefully they won't die on me. The banana tree looks like it's in pretty sad shape, but the passionfruit looks OK so far. I've also got quite a bit of amaranth growing, plus a tiny bit of chard. I've harvested one small white and purple striped Italian eggplant and exactly two pieces of okra. I've got a few leeks and onions that are looking good, and I've harvested all but one of the scallions. The corn was a bit of a bust but what little corn we've got is still out in the yard, drying so we can harvest it and pop it as popcorn. (I planted both sweetcorn and popcorn but screwed up by not labeling them well.)
Mostly I'm just waiting for the weather to cool so I can plant cover crops - particularly fava beans - EVERYWHERE to fix up the soil a bit. There are some cover crops I can plant now, but I'd like to mostly wait for the rainy season so I don't have to waste water on them. Once our soil is improved, it won't need as much water as it needs now, because the water will be able to penetrate and be stored in the soil instead of evaporating off the top.
So that's what I'm up to. Gardening isn't terribly difficult, but it's awfully a slow and frustrating process to wait for your soil to come to life and all of your compost to break down so you can use it.
A lizard skin I found while pruning the tree
|
