Summer = Tomatoes

For me, Summer is tomatoes. Tomatoes are summer. And that’s pretty much it.

So last week’s harvest made me very happy, and confirmed that it was Summer, my favorite season:

And E making his mother’s slow-roasted tomatoes made me even more jubilant, and reminded me that it was still Summer, still my favorite season (mmm… if only you could slow roast without the oven in the Summer…):

Gazpacho? Yet more proof of the awesomeness of Summer, and why it’s my favorite season:

And Caprese? Is there anything more indicative of Summer? Seriously? Italian anything and tomatoes? That’s just the essence of Summer:

And camping, this weekend? Yeah, that’s Summer. But even moreso is returning to this harvest:

And, from the harvest, I was inspired to make a Summer soup. The only ingredients not from our garden? Salt, olive oil, and a red bell pepper.

Roasted Heirloom Tomato Soup

First, slice tomatoes into 1 cm steaks, and layer in a baking pan. Then, top with sliced peppers from the garden (Pimiento D’espellette and jalapenos) and garlic from the dried harvest. If you are lucky, some random genetic mutation may have happened in your garlic harvest, and you can just use *one* clove (i.e. not a head of cloves, just one). The largest clove you’ve ever seen:

After the garlic, add strips of a red bell pepper and sprinkle with salt and olive oil, and bake for 20 minutes at 350:

Turn and mix the tomatoes, and allow to bake for another 20-30 minutes. Puree in a blender. Serve into bowls and top with minced basil. Enjoy!

Tomato Time is Coming!

We aren’t at full production, but we’re definitely seeing ripe fruit on at least half of the varieties. Today’s harvest was impressive:

It inspired me to make an all-tomato lunch. E and I each had the pleasure of tasting and comparing large slices from several beauties:

In clockwise order, that’s White Oxheart, Thessoloniki, Ananas Noir, Kentucky Beefsteak, Brandywine Red Lantis, Green Zebra, and Black Krim. All delicious. E’s favorite for taste was Thessoloniki, then Brandywine Red Lantis, then White Oxheart. I couldn’t decide between White Oxheart, Ananas Noir, or Black Krim for overall taste, but truly, they are all excellent, it just depends on what you want (more/less acidity, more/less gel sacs, seeds, or meat, more/less sugar).

This year, Cynthia introduced me to the awesomeness that is oxheart tomatoes — pointed on the end and shaped more like a bell pepper, often with whispy droopy foliage. Thanks to her glowing reviews, we’re growing several: White Oxheart, Orange Russian 117, Sweet Horizon, and Japanese Black Trifele.

So far, White Oxheart is the only plant that has ripe fruit:

What a pleasure — the fruit production is prolific, and they are slightly sweet with medium acid. The best part, though, is that while they are the size of a beefsteak, they have the consistency of a paste tomato (lots of meat, little seeds). In other words, we look forward to roasting these, slicing them for sandwiches (won’t make the bread soggy!), and eating ’em easily with a knife and fork all summer — if there are too many at the end, they’ll make great fried green tomatoes and sauces.

Planning the Tomato Madness

Today, we had several big garden milestones.

First, day 13 after potting, we finally got one sprout of Aunt Molly’s Husk, the last of the 35 varieties to sprout. Somehow, we managed to germinate at least one seedling of every variety we tried to grow (keeping the seedlings alive, of course, is another matter, but still).

Technically, Aunt Molly’s Husk is a husk tomato or ground cherry (like a tomatillo, which we are also growing), so it’s not a true tomato, but once we were growing 33 varieties of tomatoes, given that the cheery tomato seeds I ordered over the internet came with tomatillo seeds and Aunt Molly’s Husk seeds, well… who are we to resist? Salsa verde, here we come!

Second, the tomato seedlings were allowed outside for their first exposure to the real world today. It was only 2 hours, but they seemed to like it and rewarded us with 8 new sprouts between last night and tonight.

Third, at tonight’s 13-day post seed-potting count, we are at 199/257 seedlings sprouted, for a germination rate of 77.43%.

Fourth, and finally, we got the busted concrete debris removed, cleaned up a bit of the winter garden, purchased some redwood bark for the walkways between the garden, and started the final transition to this year’s garden madness, aka The First Summer of Tomato Madness.

And yes, in case you were wondering, that is a very dead Christmas wreath hanging to the right of our front door. Perhaps we’ll take it down tomorrow…

Our Babies

Well, as I said, E and I are committed to the garden this year.

And, I’m a tomato-lovin’ fool.

So, I’m trying to grow several varieties of tomatoes from seeds.

Basically, I’ve got a *grow room* in our garage:

And, it’s so cool.

When they first sprout, they look like this:

And, then, less than 24 hours later, after exposure to the one cool flourescent and one warm flourescent bulb, they look like this:

In the interests of safety in numbers, I planted roughly 250 seeds of somewhere in the neighborhood of 35 breeds of tomatoes and tomatillos. Even with the new construction, this summer, we have space for maybe 20 plants of this type if we want to have a summer garden with vegetables of any other type. It should be interesting to see how this plays out…

First Harvest

E says the word “Harvest” sounds like “genocide” to our plants. He’s probably right.

Regardless, I don’t feel the tiniest twinge of guilt despite eating about 10 cherry tomatoes and eagerly awaiting the final ripening of Mr. Stripey’s firstborn:

As of last week, the garden as a whole looked like this:

Which is good, because we’ve successfully managed to control the fungus that infected 6 of our 7 tomato plants. We trimmed leaves. We fertilized. We sprayed antifungal. We switched to an every-other-day watering plan. And, thankfully, although they are a bit sparse for the wear, they seem to be doing much better. At last count we have somewhere around 150 tomatoes waiting to ripen. How exciting!!!

The earliest producer of the group was the squash. Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve picked about 7 great fruits like these:

The first meal was sautéed squash in a sage in browned butter sauce over whole wheat penne topped with black pepper and grated parmigiano reggiano:

And the lesson we’ve learned is that it’s best to pick them when they are still pale yellow. Apparently, the darker the rind, the thicker the rind.

Speaking of thick rinds, this dark yellow rind (an early developing fruit before we realized we should pick earlier) did a reasonable job of protecting its important reproductive portions from our local raccoon (I was still grumpy that we wouldn’t get to eat it):

Remember the Okra from seeds experiment? Well, several of the non-culled survivors have grown to full-fledged plants that have and will continue to flower, and should (hopefully) bear many fruits:

And finally, my fascination with the biology of the cucumber continues, unabated. It has grown from the tiny seedling, to the clutching, wrapping vining monster, to a fully trellised plant with a wingspan greater than 5 feet:

E and I shared the first cucumber with some store-bought tomatoes and we agreed it was amazing and we couldn’t wait for its siblings. Thankfully, after a few weeks of fallen flowers, the female flowers are now producing over-grown ovaries like no-one’s business. The babies look like this (look at the appendage attached to the unbloomed flower on the left):

And, they grow, very quickly to look like this (note the fully bloomed and wilted flower at the far end for scale):

We’ve got several proto-cukes and we can’t wait to enjoy them with the tomatoes, which are coming ever-so-slowly closer to being ripe each day.

Tonight’s garden-inspired dinner was a first course of sliced black krim (from the farmer’s market, ours are not yet ready) topped with olive oil, aged balsamic, basil and lemon thyme; followed by a second course of habanero, yellow crook-neck squash bisque that cleared my sinuses but was quite a delicious non-recipe invention, if I do say so myself.