Tomato plants are poisonous, right? Actually, not at all, according to a New York Times article that a coworker sent me on Thursday.
I’d bought into the common wisdom that tomato plants, along with potato plants and many other members of the nightshade family, contained poisons that rendered them inedible. The article stated, however, that the alkaloid in tomato plants, tomatine, has no history of poisoning humans or livestock, and that there was at least a brief record of the leaves being used in cooking, most notably in a tomato sauce served at the landmark Berkeley restaurant, Chez Panisse. Furthering the argument that tomatine is “probably not a killer,” Harold McGee, the article’s author, mentioned that the alkaloid is present in significant amounts in green tomatoes. There’s definitely a long history of eating those, often in fried form, often in the South.
I consider myself to be both a curious eater and a curious gardener, so I had to put this knowledge to the test. At the same time, I thought I’d also try my first preparation of “cossack asparagus,” the shoots of the aquatic cattail that I have growing in the pond.
First, I cut some tomato leaves off one of the plants. Next I trimmed some of the cattail shoots that had escaped into the pond from their pot. I removed the toughest outer leaves from the cattail shoots and rinsed them.
I chopped the cattail stems and the tomato leaves, and added them to a stir-fry of ginger and Japanese shishito peppers from the garden. If I were a little more adventurous, I’d have left off soy sauce so that I could have tasted the ingredients better. But I chickened out. In went a drizzle of soy.
The conclusion? I served a little side portion to John without telling him what the ingredients were.
“At first I thought they [the cattails] were green onions,” he said. “But they didn’t taste like them. And then I thought they lemongrass. But I was able to chew them.”
Such gushing enthusiasm! But after he made the reserved comments above, he agreed that the ingredients were indeed edible, and that we could have them again. And yes, I lived to write about eating both of these new ingredients.
Next time I’ll try simpler preparations so that I can better enjoy the individual flavors. Maybe a pesto sauce with raw tomato leaves. (I found that the cooking removed most of their flavor.) Or maybe I’ll try preparing a side dish of cattail stems steamed like asparagus.
One of my gardening resolutions for the year was to explore the lesser-known edible qualities of my garden plants. I’m glad that I did.
August 01 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: cattails • tomatoes | 7 Comments »
View the update to this post here.
Here’s a bit of political unpleasantness I read about in a seed description in the Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds catalog listing for the Iraqi tomato variety, Rouge D’Irak:
Saving seeds was made illegal under the “Colonial Powers” of the United States. Under the new law, Iraqi farmers must only plant seeds from “protected varieties” from international corporations.
First Hiliburton, then Blackwater, and now monster agribusiness taking advantage of the war. I wish I was surprised.
The Baker Creek online catalog actually lists five different plants of Iraqi origin, in case you’d like to help preserve varieties that Iraqi farmers now can’t legally grow from their own seeds: four tomatoes, Tatar of Mongolistan, Rouge D’Irak, Al-Kuffa, and Nineveh; along with a melon, Baghdad Long. Aren’t you heirloom tomato specialists looking for new varieties to try? How about these plants with an amazing contemporary history?
Doing some quick research on this I ran across a posting over at The Alchemist’s Garden that’s great reading. Take a look!
January 10 2009 | Categories: gardening | Tags: Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds • heirloom tomatoes • heirloom vegetables • Iraq • Iraq War • melons • politics • saving seeds • tomato seeds • tomatoes | 4 Comments »
Happy Halloween to all of you!
Growing up, Halloween was always my favorite of the holidays. These were the years before everyone cloistered their children into parties surrounded by armed guards, and after the years when the celibrants really meant “trick or treat” when they said it—as in “give me some candy, otherwise I’ll throw eggs on your cars.” Ah. Kindler, gentler times…
I have three little selections to share with you today, ranked from mildy scary to dizzyingly horrifying.
Number one: Scary.
(The image to the left from the Orchids in Our Tropics web store [ source ])
In my orchid-growing days I was fascinated by plants in the Pleurothallis alliance of neotropics orchids, although I was never brave enough to try growing any of them. Of the thirty or so genera in the alliance, one genus had a spectacular name so appropriate for today: Dracula!
And if that’s not wild enough, Carl Luer in 1978 described what is perhaps the most outlandish of the species in the genus. And what do you suppose this mad scientist picked for the species name? Vampira! (A mad scientist with a sense of humor—I like that!) Besides having a terrific name, Dracula vampira is one awesome plant, something this photo attests to. Most of the pleurothallids are small little wonders, but the flowers on this one are eight inches top to bottom.
Scary, but intriguingly beautiful at the same time.
Number two: Scarier.
I know that I’ve shared this one bit of scariness with you before, but it continues to scare me every time I see it.
Ugly house
Every neighborhood probably has one of these, a house with a yard that looks like it’s auditioning for a part in a post-holocaust movie. Like, did the radiation from the bomb blast take out all the plants? To their credit, the homeowners do get points for creating a yard that takes no water whatsoever—a bonus in our current drought. But there are so many better ways to save water and enhance the world you live in. Greg suggested that someone seedbomb this house in a bit of guerrilla gardening, but how do you seedbomb concrete?
I’m not a big fan of the new generation of fake turf that’s going around these days. Although it’s light years beyond Astroturf, it still looks like plastic from less than fifteen feet away, and it does nothing to battle the urban heating phenomenon. At least it would begin to dress up this yard. And currently the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California is offering rebates of thirty cents per square foot of lawn that you replace with the plastic stuff. (At a cost of $12 a square foot for the fake turf, the rebate doesn’t go terribly far…)
The water agencies are also offering rebates on water-efficient sprinkler heads, starting at $4.00 per head, which would pay for most of the unit, as well as rebates on weather-based sprinkler timers. Check out the information on the rebate programs. One grouse I have with them is that there’s nothing that would give you a credit for replacing lawn with low-water-use plants that would also help keep the city cool by reducing the amount of reflected solar energy that is converted to urban overheating.
Number three: Scariest.
I was in the back yard looking for the cat the other evening, rounding her up for the evening indoors. She was being extra-coy that night, and I had to go for the flashlight. Returning to the garden, the flashlight beam highlighted this atrocity less than two feet from my face: the dreaded tomato tobacco hornworm! (Edit: Thanks to Jenny for correcting my identification of this little terror.)
Tomato Hornworm
Eek! I felt like Janet Leigh in the shower scene from Psycho, only I was better dressed at the moment.
This is a horror than any gardener can empathize with, I’m sure, particularly when the tomato tobacco hornworm is chomping on the last precious tomato plant of the season. As much as I try to be kind to nature, I marched inside to get the Felco shears and did battle with the beast.
(This photo is actually of another worm I discovered the next day. All summer long there were no hornworms. And then suddenly, bam!, there were several, chomping away on what may be the last tomato in the neighborhood.)
So…you decide. Was the tomato tobacco hornworm the scariest thing? Or was it the vile, murderous gardener who would commit unspeakable acts with a pair of shears?
October 31 2008 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • my garden | Tags: Dracula vampira • Halloween • orchids • tomato hornworm • tomatoes • water rebates • water use | 3 Comments »
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.
Some fo this season
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 »
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.
Caprese salad tomato tower
, 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 »
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 »
