Tag Archives: tomatoes

getting ahead of myself

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I’m trying valiantly to get back in the game. My garden is overgrown, the weeds are laughing at me, and I *gasp* finally broke down and hired someone to help me in my yard. Yes, my mother, frugal German/Scot that she was, is rolling over in her grave. Sorry, mom, but if I wanted to walk through my yard without tripping on ivy vines or dog presents, it had to be done.

Amazingly, I was getting tomatoes until about a week ago. My lemongrass is still alive outside, and hopefully will transition well to being an inside plant this winter. We just found some carrots and onions  hiding in a raised bed. The cucumbers and green beans produced for ages, I’ve got kale and mesclun and lettuce in my backyard, and cilantro (that I successfully killed in the spring) is happy as a clam growing direct from seed in the fall. Who knew?

Today’s surprise finds.

So, not as much a bust as I thought this year was, especially when I was ridiculously overachieving in the spring. I’m kinda scared to update my garden math totals, because I know I probably didn’t break even. Not because my garden wasn’t capable of producing, but because I was traveling five out of eight weeks in July and August, which just happens to be prime produce season in these here parts.

Plus, this gardening stuff is hard work. Americans who are so far removed from their food sources have conveniently forgotten how labor-intensive food production is – and how artificially low-priced food is. Don’t believe me? In 2004, Oxfam America wrote a report on farm workers in Florida and North Carolina, where in order to make $50 a day, workers have to pick TWO TONS of tomatoes. That’s $6.25 and 250 lbs an hour. Could you do that? Things have improved a little since then, but not much. Just so you can get cheap tomatoes at the grocery store.

But I digress. As a busy working mom, the garden sat on the back burner for a while this summer. I’m planning on learning from my successes and failures, plotting out new strategies for the spring, and scaling back the volume of stuff I grow. Maybe….

the all volunteer army

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I’ve grown vegetable plants many, many times before. This is the first time I’ve done so many things from seed. As challenging as nurturing seedlings into full-grown plants can be, babying things from seed adds a whole new level of difficulty. I can’t tell you how many seedlings I’ve seen die from too much water, not enough water, too much sun, not enough sun, or being in the wrong place at the wrong time this season. I’m not sure I’m cut out for this level of commitment every year.

That’s why I’m thankful for the veritable terra cotta army of volunteer tomato plants that I discovered when taking out my (overwhelmingly prolific) pea plants. I’d interspersed spinach seeds in the pea bed, but the peas went nuts and the spinach was crowded out, so I wasn’t expecting much. Imagine my surprise when I saw these lovely offspring from last year’s bumper crop of tomatoes.

(There’s still some straggly peas in there, sorry). I must have pulled out as least as many little plants to sacrifice to the gods of space as what you see freshly mulched above. I decided to keep these guys because, other than Sun Golds, none of my tomato seedlings are turning out well. And by that I mean I transplanted them into large containers over a month ago and they’re still not any bigger than two inches tall.

So this little life lesson is teaching me to be thankful for what I get. Even if I have no idea what types of tomatoes these guys will end up to be. They will still be juicy and delicious and full of seeds for next year’s crop of mistakes.

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What’s a garden post without a victory garden update? Drumroll please…

Now we’re cooking with gas. Told you I had a bumper crop of peas. With one pack of snow peas and half a pack of snap peas, I racked in pounds and pounds of the darn things. This also doesn’t count what I randomly munched on before I got inside to the scale, or the ones I missed picking and found while ripping the fading pea plants out.

You can see that the ridiculously hot weather we had this spring did not really help my greens out much. Same thing with the shiitakes (we have a mushroom log, which is fan-freaking-tastic) – we had four giant ones pop out at once, and then nothing, because it’s been so hot.

Things that still look reasonably good in my yard include – the bean teepee (I wanted to do more than one but I ran out of steam), the Parisian pickling cucumbers, dill, creeping thyme, mint, chives, zucchini, onions, garlic, tomatoes, lemongrass. I planted pumpkin seeds but haven’t seen any vines pop up yet, and I didn’t get to a bunch of seeds that I wanted to. But hey, there’s always next year.

let’s call the whole thing off.

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Two very different articles about tomatoes caught my eye this week. One highlighted the 80+ varieties of tomatoes grown at Vikentomater in southern Sweden. The other was an excerpt from the new book “Tomatoland”  that discussed indestructible bouncing green tomatoes on the side of a Florida highway. Sadly, most consumers at supermarkets in the US are only exposed to the latter.

Having always had access to fresh tomatoes – the summer after I moved out of my parents’ house for college, leaving them empty nesters, my mother planted 24 tomato plants, just because – I know the difference between a mealy, barely red, flavor-deprived tomato and a fresh ripe one right off the vine that bursts open on your tongue. There’s no contest. But I wondered how many types of tomatoes consumers actually have access to in a store, versus what they can get if they grow them on their own?

Surreptitiously checking out a nameless Big Box High End Organic Hipster Grocery Store after work today, I found lots of tomatoes, the majority red. There were two boxes of mixed heirloom tomatoes, some orange cherry tomatoes, and red grape, red roma, red ‘salad’ (beefsteak, I presume), and two different types of red, beefsteak-ish tomatoes on the vine.  So at the Grocery Store that Tries Too Hard, there were seven varieties (and I’m being generous).  Had I visited the standard grocery store, I suspect there would be a smaller variety. Prices ranged from $1.99/lb for the romas to $5.99/lb for the heirlooms.

In contrast, I have eleven intentional tomato plants in a raised bed in my backyard, and two stragglers who reseeded themselves from a stray tomato from last summer. A neighbor and I bought most of the tomato seedlings from Cross Country Nurseries, a small nursery in a neighboring state who use organic fertilizers and natural pest control. Out of the 130 varieties they offered, I randomly picked seven, mainly because of their names (who can pass up an Old German tomato? I know I can’t). We tend to like smaller tomatoes for garnish and for Caprese salads, so many of these are cherry or grape tomatoes:

  • Coyote
  • Early Wonder
  • Grape (2)
  • Mexico Midget (2)
  • Old German
  • Red Pear (2)
  • Sun Gold

Along with my two indeterminate plants and one seedling from Grow Pittsburgh’s stand at May Market which I couldn’t resist (Dad’s Sunset, I think), I’ll have nine or ten different types of tomatoes in my backyard for about $50 in plant purchases. To break even, these plants will have to produce somewhere between 10 and 20 lbs of maters over the season. And they’ll come in all shapes, sizes, and flavors, in contrast to the homogenous ones at the store.

Tomatoes are easy plants to grow – grab a cage, a piece of bamboo (6 for under $3 at your local garden center), or a random long skinny stick to tie it to, sunlight, some water, and you’re all set. You can enjoy the variety of non-industrial, non-indestructible, non-boring tomatoes all summer long.

planning ahead

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A few weeks ago, I realized that our garden area (such that it is) mirrored my son’s garden diorama from school. I use a closeup of it for my header, but here it is in all its fabulousness:

This was the first ‘alternative’ homework project he’s worked on and enjoyed making. We planned the diorama first before we built it, he was in charge of background decoration, and we decided on and produced the vegetable garden beds together (which is why the tomato leaves are yellow like the flowers). He was excited to do something different for homework, I was excited to get him involved in an art project, and the topic of gardening was cool to both of us.

Little did I know that our relatively unplanned garden ended up mirroring this diorama. I hurriedly planted peas on St. Patrick’s Day after dark with the floodlights on. We decided to make raised beds for the ten tomato plants I had purchased with a neighbor after I had already purchased them. And I threw some carrot seeds into the mix after I remembered the cover of this book in my mother’s gardening repertoire (which I now have – the 1975 version that’s officially older than I am, that is). Yet, our garden is shaping up just as he and I planned:

(The carrot seeds have just been planted, so no pictures yet.)

He brought the diorama home on his last day of school this week – when I get home, I want to reinforce his great plan with what’s happening outside. An art project in the winter is yet another way to get your kids connected with the garden – whether or not you realize it at the time.