[ Lost in the Landscape ]

many parts are edible

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 »

seed saving banned?

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 »

halloween frights

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.

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.)

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 »

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 »

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 »