[ 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 »

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 »

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 »