The 2012 Tomato Line-Up

I gave a run down last year on the tomatoes we planted, so I think it’s only fitting to give this year’s crop its props.  Here we go, in no particular order:

Gardener’s Delight:  (heirloom) Small and grows in bunches; very sweet.  They are also very productive.

Great White Beefsteak: (heirloom) Last year we got a plant from our neighbor, who thought she forgot seed them this year.  Luckily, she was wrong.  We have at least two in the garden.  Mild, sweet and has meat that can look like a peach.

Caro red: (heirloom) Another, “Opps, I forgot seed this”, but “wrong”!  We ate the first one last night and it was delicious.

Cornue des Andes:  (heirloom) Shaped like peppers, these tomatoes turn bright red and can be pretty heavy.  An excellent sauce and cooking tomato, but a little too mealy to eat raw.

Noir de Crimee: (heirloom) From the “purple” tomato family.  Excellent raw, thin skin, and lots of meat.

Prince Noir: (heirloom) Another purple tomato, but smaller than the Noir de Crimee. Rich and sweet.

Roma: Well-known Italian tomato use for sauces.  Many of my Roma seedlings got sick, so we only have two plants that I am fiercely coddling.

Russian: (heirloom) This is a very large, tasty, and juicy tomato.  These seedlings fared well, so we have many in the garden.

Beefsteak: Classic round, and red.  This doesn’t have as much character as some of the other tomatoes, but it works when mixed in sauces.

Tomatillos: This green Mexican tomato is used to make salsa verde.  I don’t like them raw in salads, which is how Christophe ate them until I came along.  They are very rustic and grow well with other plants.  I’ve never seeded them; they sprout from fallen fruit the previous year.

Inspiration

Red Sweet Onion, Yellow Patisson, Tomatoes: Gardener’s Delight and Black Prince, Basil

I love this time of year; well, I love this time of year besides the blazing, unforgiving, and constant heat.  I can walk into the vegetable garden with no idea of what I’m making for lunch and I can fill my basket with almost anything I’d like and I’m back in the kitchen with a plan.  It’s more than just having a menu idea; the vegetable garden is a place where I find ideas about my life beyond the kitchen.  I often sit on one of the stone walls in the evening and try to take it all in: the garden, the surrounding mountains and forest, and the setting sun.  I hone my future plans and realize what ones are worth keeping and what ones need to be modified.  Perhaps because it is the only green space for the moment, the various colors, or the appreciation I get from watching my seedlings grow into plants that tower over six feet tall, but the garden is a place where I find my inspiration.  I learn more about who I want to be and how to be a better person.  It is constantly changing, and I hope me too, for the better.

Night Watch

The garden at night.

The drought has taken its toll on quite a few things: trees are suffering, there are water restrictions, and even the animals are acting a bit odd.  The blue jays that attacked our fig tree have now striped it bare and we have discovered a new problem: foxes, or at least we think they are foxes.

For the last few weeks we have found an animal has dug up part of the garden.  It’s not attacking the vegetables, but it’s digging in the dirt leaving giant holes and unearthing the plants.  We think it’s burrowing for worms or any other form of nutrition.  At first we thought it was cat, but the damage was far too extensive.  Then the idea of a boar developed, but it couldn’t have been one both since the damage was not nearly enough and the potatoes have been left untouched (boars like potatoes).  It’s most likely not a dog, so all fingers started pointing towards a fox.  We’ve already lost a few plants to the digging, and unearthing the plants each morning that have been buried is time consuming, so we’ve had to act defensively.  Each night around midnight we go out to the garden and wait.  It sits at the edge of the property next to small cliff that plunges into a forest below which harbors anything from deer to boars to foxes.  We wait for any sound from the darkness and when it happens, we go on the attack, hurling rocks into the tree tops above so the sound amplifies and frightens the animal.  After a small barrage, we stop and hear it scurrying away.  It works, but it’s not a permanent fix; if we don’t go out to defend the garden each night the animal comes back.  It’s changing our night rituals and stretching out long days even longer.

I admit venturing into the garden so late at night with an active imagination is not always fun.  Sometimes, I’ve darted back to the house after the barrage in fears of the animal taking advantage of my turned back and wanting revenge.  I lock the door after me, happy to be in a well light kitchen and knowing that animals, without opposable thumbs, can’t turn knobs, rendering me safe from their grasps.

Gardening has taken a very odd turn.  I’m losing sleep over a pumpkin and dream about animals that can unlock doors.  The growing season can be quite long, so I’m impatiently waiting for its end when everything can be gathered from the garden and my nights can spent indoors where they are supposed to be.  For now, all I can think is, “That pumpkin better be damn good.”

Pecking Order

View of the fig tree from the kitchen window.

I’m currently fascinated with the fig tree in front of our house, not because I like figs, but because of the commotion that is going on inside of it.  We’re in a draught.  The ground is dry and there are minimal bugs for the birds to eat which means they are looking for any food they can get their beaks into.  Currently, they are attacking the figs.

The other morning over coffee, I was startled to find three enormous blue jays in the fig tree that stands just outside the window.  They were squawking so loudly I couldn’t hear Christophe across the table from me.  They were pecking their way through all the ripe or semi-ripe figs on and chased all the other birds away until they had their fill.  It wasn’t until they were decidedly finished that the smaller birds arrived, peaking away at the open figs the jays had left behind.  It was like a choreographed scene: the jays exited stage right and the smaller birds made their entrance on cue.  There were some occasional flutters, but overall the smaller birds ate together peacefully, sometimes 15 at a time.  By late morning when the sun hit the tree, all the birds were gone, ducking for cover somewhere in the shade, leaving behind bits of fig on the ground for us to clean up.

This morning, the tree was calm.  The jays are gone and all the ripe figs have been eaten.  I thought it was a blessing because while watching the fluttery commotion is entertaining, cleaning up after the birds and half eaten figs is not.  That’s what I thought until I entered the garden; the jays have moved onto our tomatoes.

What the jays leave behind.

I’m in the Weeds!



Can you find the tomato plant in this photo?



It’s almost mid-summer, and like many people who aren’t at the beach on vacation, I’ve got my head in the garden, more specifically,I've got my head in the weeds.  No matter how hard we try or no matter our good intentions, the weeds seem to get the best of us.  We’ve moved from “control” mode to “all out defense”.  I turn my back after weeding the tomatoes and they pop back up again like I’ve never been there.  It’s an all-out battle as we wait and hope for the first tomato to ripen without being strangled by the invasive intruders.  But, this is not new, we do this game every year and every year we promise not to let it get out of control.  I wonder when we will learn. 

Shoot!  I’ve turned my back on the onions again; I must get back to them before the weeds try to take me down too. 

I swear I just weeded the onions.

Garden Enemy No. 1

It’s not to occasional mouse that sneaks away with a strawberry now and then; it’s not the burrowing mole unearthing the potatoes before their time; it’s not the neighbor’s cat that sneaks into the garden at night, twirling up twine and rolling in the dirt as if it’s been sprinkled with catnip; garden enemy number 1 is this thing:

The white worm.

It can make a plant go from looking like this:

To looking like this:

The transformation is almost overnight.  It eats the plant’s roots, so as we mindfully tend to the plant above, the beast is destroying it from below and we are completely unaware of it until it’s too late.

Christophe’s plight against this intruder is well documented amongst friends.  He once was spotted carefully hunting a worm that has made its way down a row of lettuce.  When he finally excavated the critter, it was green and as fat as a finger.  Christophe’s triumphantly crushed it on some stones.  He still recounts the incident like an old war story – with a glim in his eye knowing the enemy has been vanquished.

During planting season, I ran across quite a few, all who meet their dome in a similar fashion.  I can share a berry or two, but a whole plant is a bit too greedy.    

Greater Expectations

New Potatoes no bigger than golf balls.

It doesn’t look like we’ll be bringing home the wheel barrels of potatoes that we happily found ourselves with last year.  Half of our crop is already done.  We planted two varieties of potatoes, Charlotte and Rosabelle, and we are discovering the Rosabelle potato plants are sensitive to mildew.  They’re already done growing, even though it’s 3 to 4 weeks earlier than last year.  We always dig some up early and enjoy “new potatoes”, but this year’s crop will solely consist of them.  Potato plants end up wilting away by mid to late summer, signaling it’s time for us to dig to them up and see what we’ve got, but it looks like this is not the year for us to stock up on potatoes.  The Charlotte potato plants are still growing, so there is hope, but until then, it looks like we’ll be feasting on small new potatoes for some time.

It doesn't take a trained eye to see what plants are the Rosabelle and what plants are the Charlotte potatoes.

Seedlings

Spring is arriving, albeit, slowly, and it has gotten me in the spirit of thinking about the garden.  Every year, I get excited about the potential of what can be, and get lost a little bit in fantasy of a super lush garden with overflowing bounty.  I start out strong, but often lose steam somewhere in the process of weeding and vow to myself the next year will be different.  So, here I am, the next year, and I’m looking at my seedlings to give me a jolt of enthusiasm.

Last night I seeded 40 pots of tomatoes and hot peppers.  This is the most I’ve done; we get most of our garden from a neighbor who has such a green thumb she can make plants live just by willing it.  She seeds everything and has moved from numerous hot boxes on the ground to a full blown greenhouse.  It is her passion and her air of making it look so easy that has encouraged me to seed what I can. 

So, here I am, without a greenhouse and weather that is too cold to use my single hot box, and I have 40 pots of dirt sitting on trays in my living room.  I wish I could say I’ve got a set up in the basement with growing light, but I don’t.  I don’t even have a permanently unoccupied sunny table top to let them grow in peace.  Instead, now starts the 2 month run of me chasing sunlight around the house with trays of dirt in hopes some plants will appear.  I know, this is an idea that seems absolutely ridiculous when sitting in a bright sunny house build to maximize sun exposure, the problem is, I’m not in that house.  I’m in an old Catalan house in Southern France.  These houses were build centuries ago when windows were small and scarce.  The fewer openings there are to the exterior means less heat loose and exposure to the howling winds.  Our house has had some renovations, but not enough to remove the challenge from this task.

Just like previous years, I take the trays from room to room following the sun.  If it’s warm enough, I even bring them out to the terrace in the afternoon, I just make they’re back inside before the sun dips behind some clouds.  Don’t get me wrong, I willingly participate in this sunlight marathon, but am happy when the day comes that the seedlings can be permanently transferred outside as they wait to be transplanted into the garden.