[ Lost in the Landscape ]

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 »

red, red tomatoes

I’ve been wait­ing impa­tiently for my plant of the Early Girl tomato to bear fruit, and Sat­ur­day turned out to be the day. There were five in total, small­ish, but a beau­ti­ful red color, with just a flash of green on their shoul­ders. (Greg on Cape Cod also com­mented that this reputed early bearer was tak­ing its time for him as well.)

Here’s the loot from the Sat­ur­day: the first Early Girls, as well as some Mr. Stripeys.

They made for a tasty, quick black bean salad for lunch. But they really came into their own sliced up with some Moz­zarella di Bufala Cam­pana (a.k.a. buf­falo moz­zarella), olive oil, basil, pep­per and a smidge of salt–your basic cap­rese salad.

Sim­ple, uncom­pli­cated foods, fresh and deli­cious from the back yard. Sum­mer doesn’t get much bet­ter than this! If only I had some water buf­fa­los to make my own fresh cheese…

July 14 2008 | Categories: my garden | Tags: Early Girl tomato • food • Mr. Stripey tomato | 3 Comments »

mistaken identity?

Sum­mer in my gar­den began offi­cially on Wednes­day, June 25 at approx­i­mately 6:35 p.m., when I held in my hands the first ripe tomato of the sea­son. Here’s a shot of the fourth tomato, from yes­ter­day. Seems like a cou­ple of large two-legged mam­mals invaded the gar­den and ate the first three…

I’ve said a cou­ple unkind words against the moun­strously vig­or­ous Mr. Stripey, but that’s the vari­ety that bore first this year. The fruits so far have been small, about three ounces, sweet and extremely mild, with a very thin skin. The color is a rich, medium yel­low, with dark rosy-red flush­ing to the fruits both inside and out. So far they don’t gush clas­sic tomato fla­vor, but they’re still the best toma­toes I’ve had since last autumn’s farmer’s markets.

The fact that this is the first vari­ety to bear this year con­fuses me a bit. Mr. Stripey is usu­ally listed as being a large, beef­steak, late-season tomato, bear­ing 80–85 days after being set out. Some sources men­tion that the vari­ety often sold as Mr. Stripey is actu­ally the smaller-fruited Tigerella, and sev­eral sites list their plants with both names. How unhelp­ful is that? If I can judge by pho­tos of both vari­eties, mine looks much closer to the true Mr. Stripey, even though the fruit is small. What do you think?

A cou­ple Mr. Stripey images on the web:
[ source ]	[ source ]
Ver­sus a cou­ple Tigerella images on the web:
[ source ]	[ source ]

Most sources list Tigerella as also being a late-bearing vari­ety, so mis­taken iden­tity would have had lit­tle to do with my see­ing the fruits towards the start of tomato season.

The thing that con­fuses me most about the iden­tity of the toma­toes in the gar­den is the fact that Mr. Stripey sits about four feet away in the bed from the hybrid Early Girl. I planted the hybrid on the same day as Mr. Stripey, mainly to get some early toma­toes and to get a head start on sum­mer. The Early Girl label says it should bear 50 days from being set out, and that’s been a rea­son­able esti­mate based on my past expe­ri­ence grow­ing it. This sea­son, even though Early Girl has a half dozen fairly nicely-sized fruits on its branches, they’re all still as green as the leaves. Fifty days from being set out? Not even close.

So, instead of con­clud­ing that Mr. Stripey came with the wrong label, I’m start­ing to won­der if I don’t have an impos­tor try­ing to pass as Early Girl. Maybe some dis­grun­tled Home Depot employee switched the tags? Or their sup­plier decided a red tomato is a red tomato and no one’s going to know the dif­fer­ence? This wouldn’t be the first time I got some­thing other than what the label said.

Even though there’s a cer­tain amount of vari­a­tion from plant to plant–it’s prob­a­bly a lit­tle unfair to eval­u­ate an entire tomato vari­ety with just one plant–I doubt that the vari­a­tion would explain the dif­fer­ences I’ve seen. Time for CSI San Diego. Time for some back­yard DNA testing…

All that said, I guess I’ve made a strong case for buy­ing seed from a rep­utable grower–and then care­fully label­ing the seedlings!

June 28 2008 | Categories: my garden • plant profiles | Tags: Early Girl tomato • labeling plants • Mister Stripey tomato • Mr. Stripey tomato | 4 Comments »

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 »