A picture of tomatoes
Dante managed to be born in the middle of tomato season here at the (notional) Lazy P Rocking C Rancho. After a mind- altering tomato experience last year, I decided to go with organic and dry culture this season, which is to say that once I had gotten the transplants established using a normal watering schedule and two applications of worm castings, I stopped watering the vines, other than a quick mist on the five or so very hottest days for temperature control. The theory, drawn from enology, is that we lower yield to concentrate sugar in the remaining fruit, which we force to be made with as little water as possible.
We planted five varieties of small tomato: some bog-standard Roma, an odd green striped heirloom, cherries, grapes, and tiny pear-shaped yellow ones which looked cool on the nursery tag. This photo doesn’t make the scale very clear, but picture the largest tomato (the green one) as being about three inches across. The fruit is turning out perfectly, the best I’ve ever had under any circumstances, and it’s beautiful too. The grape tomatoes, in particular, are meaty and strawberry-sweet, perfect sliced in half with a heavy dusting of black pepper on the cut side.
This posting is mostly directed at my future self, as a reminder to be patient when growing tomatoes. Good soil maintenance, good transplant management, then laissez croître.
Abby:
that’s a lot of tomatoes for someone who used to detest things…what kind of flavor does the green one have? is it eaten raw or better cooked?
10 August 2007, 5:59 amColin:
That green one tastes just like a regular tomato. You can tell it’s ripe because it has some contrast between its yellow stripes on top and the green body. It’s just fine for eating raw, although probably the least tasty of the varieties we’re growing. Its chief virtue is that it looks great on top of a salad.
It took me about twenty years to find out that what I detested all along are watery, insipid, force-ripened grocery store tomatoes. Garden-fresh ones are great. And last year, I was introduced to dry-cultured tomatoes, which are so much more flavorful than conventional ones that comparison isn’t (chortle chortle) fruitful. Hopefully, we’ll still have plenty of them when you get into town. Last year, which did have an unusually long wet season, I was still occasionally harvesting tomatoes until about November, so you have to like your odds.
Incidentally, when I got to California, I discovered that my favorite sandwich had changed (from corned beef special to ABLT), which got me eating even said watery insipid etc. from time to time. So in some sense, bacon was the gateway drug to tomatoes for me.
10 August 2007, 3:24 pm