[ Lost in the Landscape ]

first tomatoes and artichokes

It’s hardly May, and I have my first toma­toes of the sea­son already, this gor­geous pair on a seedling of the heir­loom Chero­kee Purple.

Okay, I cheated a lit­tle. These are actu­ally hot­house toma­toes. Some seed I planted in the green­house last spring didn’t ger­mi­nate until last fall. Trans­plant­ing the plants out­doors in Novem­ber would have meant cer­tain death for the lit­tle toma­toes, but I didn’t have the heart to pull them out. One of them set down roots through the drainage holes of the pot and just kept grow­ing. Although the green­house is too shady and unheated, the plant sur­vived. And now I have these first two toma­toes, with more on the way.

I’ve never used the green­house for any­thing as prac­ti­cal as grow­ing veg­gies, so this will be an inter­est­ing experiment.

The first arti­chokes of the sea­son are also on some plants that were almost acci­dents. For years we had a clump of an espe­cially good selec­tion grow­ing in the veg­gie gar­den. But a room addi­tion on the house put the gar­den in shade, and the plants went into decline. I dug them out and was going to toss them, until I decided to try a cou­ple stems in the back of a new raised bed. The com­bi­na­tion of more light, more mois­ture, and fresh compost-rich soil worked their magic, and the plants are now look­ing as good as they ever have.

I like to think that I earned some bonus points for show­ing some mercy and not toss­ing the tomato and arti­choke plants into the greens recy­cling. But in the case of the arti­choke, at least, it’s another life les­son in try­ing to find the right loca­tion for an under­per­form­ing plant.

Are there any plants that you’ve had sim­i­lar expe­ri­ences with? Any “res­cue plants” that ended up reward­ing you as much as oth­ers you’d planned for?

May 12 2009 | Categories: art • gardening • my garden • places | Tags: artichokes • Cherokee Purple tomato • vegetables | 2 Comments »

farewell to tomatoes

Last week­end I pulled up the first of this year’s tomato plants, an Early Girl that had stopped pro­duc­ing. I’m star­ing at Mis­ter Stripey, which has just a few fruits left, and, most sad of all, my main Chero­kee Pur­ple plant, which has flow­ers but not remain­ing fruit. There’s no way the fruit would set and ripen before the weather turns even colder. It’ll be hard, but those plants will have to go soon.

To think, two weeks ago the kitchen cut­ting board looked like this.

But now the only toma­toes on the counter are some a friend gave us at his birth­day party last Fri­day. As I left his house with the bag, I felt like a how a hard­work­ing laborer must feel after he’s laid off after thirty years and has to go on food stamps or some other gov­ern­men­tal assis­tance. It was hard, swal­low­ing my pride, accept­ing hand­outs. But the end of sum­mer has lots of hum­bling moments when the glo­ri­ously gaudy excess of sum­mer sud­denly shuts off.

It was a good time to eval­u­ate the three vari­eties I put in the ground this year. Early Girl was green and unpro­duc­tive most of the year, only pro­duc­ing fruit late in the sea­son and in unim­pres­sive quan­tity. Their fla­vor was fine, cer­tainly bet­ter than store toma­toes, but not as good as a tomato could be. I will not be grow­ing it again.

I trashed Mis­ter Stripey on these blog pages ear­lier in the sea­son for its ram­bunc­tious­ness. When it finally set­tled down and started to pro­duce it ended up being the most pro­lific of the three vari­eties, giv­ing us several-to-many smaller-sized toma­toes sev­eral times a week. The skin was thin and they didn’t keep as well as other vari­eties. Also the insides were very liq­uid, not at all meaty like beef­steak vari­eties; but sliced up on a tomato pizza they were stun­ning with their gold and rose and scar­let col­ors. I don’t know that I’ll grow it again next year, but I’ll save some seed from the one of the last fruits.

And as far as Chero­kee Pur­ple, yes, I’ll def­i­nitely grow it again. (I’ve already saved a small enve­lope of seeds to plant and share.) I’d put four plants in the ground this year. Three were in bad spots for toma­toes and barely pro­duced. The one plant that rated a prime spot did well, pro­duc­ing a vig­or­ous but not crazed green canopy, and the fruits were usu­ally in the ten-to-fourteen ounce range. The fla­vor of these was clas­sic tomato fla­vor, even here near the coast where the tem­per­a­tures barely cracked eighty degrees this summer.

The trick for next sea­son, of course, is to set aside some good spots for Chero­kee Pur­ple and the cou­ple other vari­eties I might try. Empty space in a gar­den? What’s that?

As long as I’m on the sub­ject of toma­toes, I wanted to share Rein­hards Tomaten, an excel­lent Ger­man site with pho­tos of dozens of vari­eties of toma­toes that Hans shared with me this past week. Although there were no pho­tos of the one vari­ety of mine that I was think­ing might have come mis-identified this year (Mis­ter Stripey), there’s a photo of Chero­kee Pur­ple, plus shots of intrigu­ing vari­eties like Black Russ­ian, Tla­colula Ribbed and the wild tomato rel­a­tive Lycop­er­si­con macro­carpum lutea. If only I had more space to grow more of them…

September 09 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden • plant profiles | Tags: Cherokee Purple tomato • Early Girl tomato • heirloom tomatoes • Mister Stripey tomato • Mr. Stripey tomato • tomatoes | 1 Comment »

tomato sculpture

I was brows­ing the web for recipes for cap­rese salad, the clas­sic salad of Capri using plum toma­toes, moz­zarella, basil, olive oil salt and pep­per. I didn’t encounter any rev­e­la­tions as far as ingre­di­ents or pro­por­tions, but I found sev­eral images of a pre­sen­ta­tion method where the tomato was sliced and then reassem­bled with slices of the cheese and basil interfiled.

Cool, I thought. But what if you use two toma­toes of dif­fer­ent col­ors? Here’s a first draft of this idea, using Mr. Stripey with the first fruit from Chero­kee Purple.

Before I add this to the menu at Spago, I’d try to be sure the toma­toes were more sim­i­lar in both size and shape. Also, cleaner, more uni­form cuts through the buf­falo moz­zarella would have made for a neater pre­sen­ta­tion.

July 28 2008 | Categories: rambles | Tags: caprese salad • Cherokee Purple tomato • food • Mister Stripey tomato • Mr s • recipes • tomatoes | 2 Comments »

in the garden

I’ve been work­ing on print­ing some of my Yel­low­stone pho­tographs. While I wait for the scan­ner to scan and the printer to do its thing it’s a per­fect oppor­tu­nity to step out­side and snap some ran­dom pic­tures of what’s going on in the garden.

The first Chero­kee Pur­ple tomato, grown from seed saved from farmer’s mar­ket toma­toes last year: I’ve been watch­ing it turn color for a week now, and I thought it was finally time to pick it. It’s smaller than most of the other fruits on the plant, but I’m guess­ing it’ll be pretty tasty…

Peru­vian daf­fodil (Hymeno­cal­lis fes­talis): John’s sis­ter sent down a lit­tle pack­age of presents the last time she vis­ited over ten years ago. A bulb of this plant was in that pack­age. That one bulb has mul­ti­plied all over the place, some in places where we put it, oth­ers in places where soil with the some bulb off­sets was moved to. And some are even com­ing in places–like the lawn–where it prob­a­bly have only arrived via seed.

This plant clearly has a life wish. No prob­lem. We like it. It’s happy with lit­tle or heavy water­ing, dap­pled shade to full sun. And it smells great.

A moth that died in the arms of Drosera dichotoma ‘Giant,’ a car­niv­o­rous sun­dew in the bog gar­den: When I first put out some car­ni­vores I was think­ing, “Ooh cool! Bug-eating plants!” Now that I’m start­ing to see all the carnage–this moth, plenty of gnats, and a beau­ti­ful orange dragonfly–I’m start­ing to worry about my ethics. I’m a veg­e­tar­ian, so why can’t the plants be too? Still, I guess it’s some sort of karmic pay­back: I eat veg­gies, so some of my veg­gies eat meat.

The flow­er­ing stem of another car­ni­vore, Drosera x ‘Marston Dragon.’ Droseras have a rep­u­ta­tion for reseed­ing like weeds. No weeds spot­ted so far, but it’s early yet in the season…

This sad lit­tle lupine is the descen­dant of a pack­age of seeds that were given out at a wed­ding we went to on the Olympic Penin­sula in Wash­ing­ton State. There was a bare spot in the yard, so the pack­age got emp­tied into it. But there was a rea­son the spot was bare: The area got almost no water and even weeds had a hard time get­ting a hold. The lupines never have attained much size–this one is less than four inches tall–but enough keep com­ing back to remind us of that misty sum­mer day.

And oh yeah, here are a cou­ple of the images I’m print­ing up. The first one: Undine Falls, Yel­low­stone National Park. The sec­ond: Tower Falls View­point, Yel­low­stone National park.

July 27 2008 | Categories: my garden | Tags: carnivorous plants • Cherokee Purple tomato • Drosera dichotoma • Drosera Marston Dragon • Hymenocallis festalis • in bloom • lupines • Peruvian daffodil • Tower Falls • Undine Falls • Yellowstone National Park | 2 Comments »

barbie’s excellent garden adventure

Real­tors have their loca­tion, loca­tion, loca­tion mantra that they recite as the fac­tor that con­tributes most to a property’s value. A sim­i­lar thing could be said for pre­dict­ing how well a plant will do in the gar­den. Even if you fol­low the basic instruc­tions on a plant’s requirements–basic infor­ma­tion about its pref­er­ences for sun or shade, for instance, or its pref­er­ences for more or less water–lots of other vari­ables can fig­ure in the equa­tion for how well the plant will do for you.

Here are a cou­ple pairs of pic­tures of Bar­bie pos­ing by plants in the gar­den so you can get a sense of scale. In each pair­ing, the plants next to Bar­bie went into the ground on the same day. But you can see how much dif­fer­ence the loca­tion of the trans­plants made in how much they liked their new homes.

First is Bar­bie next to plants of Rud­beckia hirta ‘Green Eyes’ that were planted last Fall:

In the first loca­tion, in the front yard, the plant is hang­ing on but not happy. It gets sun vir­tu­ally all day and gets watered infre­quently. The soil is fairly dense clay with min­i­mal amend­ments, and the loca­tion has no mulch. With multi-year-old plant­i­ngs nearby, much of the water is sucked up by roots of the more estab­lished plants.

In the sec­ond loca­tion, the plants are doing much bet­ter. The expo­sure is East-Northeast, mean­ing the plants get sun in the morn­ing, with some addi­tional boost reflected off the house. Water­ing is gen­er­ally about once a week. The soil is clay, sim­i­lar to the first loca­tion, but it received a few amend­ments at the time of plant­ing. A layer of dark peb­bles serves as mulch. Though the plants are next to a shrub, the shrub was planted at the same time and the rud­beckis, mean­ing the roots from the shrub weren’t run­ning through the area and didn’t inter­fere with these plants get­ting established.

My con­clu­sion? Though fre­quently con­sid­ered a fairly drought-tolerant plant, rud­beck­ias do appre­ci­ate some mois­ture. Com­pe­ti­tion from nearby plant­i­ngs can have a dra­matic effect on how well a newly-introduced will do. Increas­ing the water­ing of the lit­tle front-yard plant could give it a bet­ter chance, and doing a lit­tle root-pruning with a shovel about a foot away from the base of the plant would help reduce com­pe­ti­tion from its thirsty neigh­bors. Some sort of mulch could help pre­serve soil mois­ture in this very exposed location.

Next we see Bar­bie posed next to plants of the tomato, Chero­kee Purple:

Both loca­tions face West-Southwest, assur­ing strong sun from before noon into late after­noon. Both loca­tions receive light-to-moderate water­ing. The soil in the first spot is mod­er­ately heavy gar­den soil amended with organ­ics. The loca­tion is part of a retired fish­pond where the con­crete on the bot­tom had holes drilled into for drainage, mak­ing this in essence a large con­tainer set into the ground. The soil is prob­a­bly less than one foot deep, and the spot isn’t mulched.

The sec­ond plant is in a raised bed with deep, sandy soil that wasn’t amended before the plant went in. The plant ben­e­fits from a light layer of wood-chip mulch.

The tomato appears to appre­ci­ate a deep soil that would encour­age a strong root sys­tem. Since I can’t do any­thing now to increase the depth of the soil in the first sit­u­a­tion or to improve its makeup, some mulching could help keep the mois­ture level more uni­form. Also, since the plant is essen­tially con­tainer­ized, appli­ca­tions of low-nitrogen fer­til­izer would help equal­ize its chances for suc­cess with the plant that can set its roots deep and wider in search of nutri­ents. For next year’s plant­i­ngs, replac­ing the cur­rent soil with a mix more appro­pri­ate for con­tain­ers could also let the plant­i­ngs fare better.

After this photo shoot in the gar­den Bar­bie had to come back inside for a rest. It’s tough being a supermodel.

July 06 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden • rambles | Tags: Cherokee Purple tomato • planting location • Rudbeckia hirta | 1 Comment »

attack of the killer tomatoes

I men­tioned com­ing back from vaca­tion and almost imme­di­ately going after one of the tomato plants that had taken over its spot in the new orna­men­tal bed.

Just one week later and it seems like I’m con­tin­u­ing to relive scenes from that 1970s schlock­buster, Attack of the Killer Toma­toes. (It was a movie so awful you had to love it, and it had the added bonus of being filmed right here, in San Diego, much of it in Mis­sion Val­ley, not more than 3–4 miles from my house. Imag­ine a hor­ror flick where the evil ele­ments are lit­tle toma­toes that jump up and go after the jugu­lar of the per­son prepar­ing to put them in his salad. Lots of tomato juice was spilled in that flick but all in the name of a ridicu­lous plot line. Unfor­tu­nately, all that seems a lit­tle sickly pre­scient these days when peo­ple are being advised against eat­ing toma­toes for fear of sal­mo­nella poisoning…)

My tomato prob­lem began with two plants from the gar­den cen­ter, the heir­loom Mr. Stripey, show in the back of the photo, and the ubiq­ui­tous mod­ern hybrid Early Girl, which is shown in the front, a week after I’d already chopped a third of the plant. Both are inde­ter­mi­nate vines, which means they keep grow­ing and grow­ing through­out their short life spans. The good con­se­quence of that is that they con­tinue to bear fruit for months. The bad is that they can grow out of control–I mea­sured Mr. Stripey and he’s already eight feet across and four high, and this at the start of only June! There are tomato cages in that pic­ture, but can you seem them?

One les­son learned out of all this is that toma­toes can respond to too much water by grow­ing like crazy, while not nec­es­sar­ily pro­duc­ing any more fruit. These two mon­sters were planted in the “guilty plea­sure” flower bed, where some higher water-use trop­i­cal neces­si­tate water­ing more fre­quently than I would in a veg­etable gar­den. You can restrict size of the plants some­what by reduc­ing the watering–or by prun­ing shears.

A cou­ple months ago I’d writ­ten about sav­ing seeds from Chero­kee Pur­ple, that ugli­est and most tasty of tomato vari­eties. Those trans­plants so far are a lot bet­ter behaved. The one below is only about four­teen inches tall and two feet across, and it’s been bloom­ing for three weeks–But then again small and well behaved is how the killer pair in the orna­men­tal bed started. At least Chero­kee Pur­ple has a rep­u­ta­tion for bal­anc­ing plant size with pro­duc­tiv­ity and high fruit quality.

If the plants don’t over­run the gar­den this should be a ban­ner tomato year, and I’m already get­ting ready to whip up salsa, cap­rese sal­ads and plates of fresh toma­toes dressed lightly with basil and olive oil and a lit­tle salt. In the mean­time I’ll be stand­ing guard with the shears.

June 13 2008 | Categories: my garden | Tags: Cherokee Purple tomato • Early Girl tomato • heirloom tomatoes • Mr. Stripey tomato • tomatoes | No Comments »

winner of an ugly contest

Last sum­mer John and I were at the farmer’s mar­ket in Ocean Beach, a funky, alter­na­tive neigh­bor­hood of San Diego. We were look­ing over some of the offer­ings at a stall when some­one behind me starts laugh­ing and shouts out over my shoul­der, “Look at those ugly-ass tomatoes!”

Obvi­ously some­one used to the per­fectly shaped (and per­fectly taste­less) gro­cery store toma­toes, he was point­ing out a pile of Chero­kee Pur­ple toma­toes to his girl­friend. “They’re, like mutant. Who’d buy that?” To be sure, the toma­toes were flat, irreg­u­larly shaped and sized, partly green and partly reddish-purple. Noth­ing to win a spot on a pinup cal­en­dar of tomato vari­eties. But these toma­toes have their rabid fol­low­ers, and I count myself one of them. They’re like the best tomato you’ve tasted, and sliced up they’re actu­ally pretty attractive.

The above is a pic­ture from the Seed Savers Exchange cat­a­log [ source ]. These are pret­tier exam­ples than you usu­ally find of this variety.

One per­son even has a domain name, cherokeepurple.com attached to his blog entries about try­ing to grow this vari­ety (with­out much suc­cess) in Arkansas. I might not be that rabid, but last year I decided to save some seeds from the best exam­ples of Chero­kee Pur­ple from the farmer’s mar­kets so that I could grow my own. This is an heir­loom, open pol­li­nated vari­ety, so they should come true from seed.

I con­sulted Sav­ing Seeds, an older book by Marc Rogers that’s still avail­able via Ama­zon (and prob­a­bly a few other sell­ers). If you own the book, give it up–You’re a plant geek. There, the basic instruc­tions were to first clean the seeds as best as you could. Next you drop them into a jar full of water for a few days until the gummy pulp sur­round­ing the seeds fer­ments and lib­er­ates the seeds. When that hap­pens, the pre­vi­ously pulpy seeds–which floated–would sink to the bot­tom of the jar. Finally you drain and dry them and store them away. I fol­lowed the instruc­tions, but I was wor­ried that there was still some pulp attached to some of the seeds when I was done with the process so that not all of them sank.

The acid test came three weeks ago when I put some of the seeds into pots. Maybe not all the seeds were processed per­fectly, but I’m now the proud par­ent of six pots of Chero­kee Pur­ple seedlings!

I have a few spots around the yard selected for them, places where I’ve never put toma­toes, so I’m hop­ing they’ll take to their new loca­tions and thrive. I’ll prob­a­bly give them a cou­ple more weeks in their pots, and then it’s time to set them loose. I’ll post the baby pic­tures as they grow up…pictures so ugly only a par­ent and lover of Chero­kee Pur­ple could love.

April 07 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden • plant profiles | Tags: Cherokee Purple tomato • heirloom tomatoes • saving seeds • seedlings • tomato seeds | 2 Comments »