Tomato Pics - The Perfect Father's Day Tribute

It's sort of a running joke in my family - my Dad and his tomato plants. There are reels and reels of home movie footage of beautiful green growing fruit. He was so proud of his garden.

So, not for nothin', I grew up to be a gardener, and I sort of specialize in tomatoes. And this year I have blossoms already on some of my plants! In the middle of June.

Dad would be proud.

First Crocuses, 2017

For 11 years now I have been marking the end of winter - the emotional if not the literal end - by watching for the day my crocuses poke their tender heads above ground. Ladies & gentlemen, that day was yesterday! In an amazing coincidence, yesterday was also the coldest day of the winter so far. at around 5°F. This wouldn't have been my choice, if I were them, but I trust that they know what they are doing.

I made sure to replace the blanket of dead leaves I pushed aside to get a peek.

The earliest I've seen crocuses come up in those 11 years was 2012, on February 29th. The latest was March 23. This year is a little on the early side, probably because we got a deep blanket of snow before the real cold came, and because last week was unusually warm.

Spring is coming now! There's no stopping this train.

Last of the Tomatoes

Last summer I tended 26 tomato plants, of several varieties. They yielded enough for us to enjoy the fresh fruit every day in August and September, and also to freeze many bags of salsa and puree.

All good things must come to an end (luckily this is also true of bad things!) and today I opened my last bag of frozen tomatoes. They are processed with onion, garlic, basil, and oregano, and I will cook the batch down with some grated carrot to make pasta sauce. It's simmering now; smells marvelous.
I took the opening of the last bag as a cue to dig out the Fedco catalog that arrived in December. I kinda wish it would arrive in January instead; in December I am too busy, and not yet weary enough of winter, to appreciate its arrival. Nevertheless, I am glad it is here now, helping me dream of long summer days.

I'll be ordering Sungolds cherry tomatoes, for sure. They are always the first and last to produce; I was still picking Sungolds when the frost came. I imagine I will have a few volunteers as well, since they are so prolific I always miss a few. And, importantly, they are my mother's favorite! Since I refuse to grow squash for her (takes up a ton of garden space and also ewwww) I owe her these at least.

Garden peaches are another favorite. A small, yellow tomato, they have a relatively short growing season - 71 days - and very sweet fruit.

I'll also be reprising the Jubilees we got last year. They were a surprise, which Fedco substituted for the Cosmonaut Volkovs I had ordered. Their season is a bit on the long side for Maine - 80 days - so it's a risk. If we get cool June, or a rainy summer, they may not produce. But they were so beautiful, and so tasty, that I'm willing to take the chance.

I didn't love the Oregon Spring variety we got last year. The flavor was a little underwhelming.  It is a full size tomato with a very short growing season - 58 days - that will thrive even in cool summers. I was tempted to get it as a hedge against a bad season, but the flavor, while good, suffers in comparison to the other varieties...and flavor is, after all, the whole point.

So, what to get in its place? I could return to the Cosmonaut Volkovs that have performed well in the past, but I do like to try new things, so I am leaning toward the Berkeley Tie Dye, a full size short season tomato said to have an almost spicy flavor. Based on my quick Google image search it appears to be a very handsome fruit as well - maybe that shouldn't matter but I am an artist, after all.

Like many Mainers, I don't mind winter, but I spend much of it dreaming of spring.

Jubilee

I'm a tomato gardener.Not in a truck-garden, farmer's-market kind of way, but we plant four raised beds, and the largest - 10" x 6" - is full of tomatoes. I usually get short season varieties: Sun Golds, Oregon Springs, Consmonaut Volkovs. But I get my seeds from Fedco, and I always check the box that says if you re out of the variety I ordered, send me something else.

This year they sent me Jubilees. Wow, what a beautiful tomato! Large, smooth, yellow-orange fruit, a little seeter than a regular tomato...and still producing. It's late October, and I just plucked this beauty. My freezer is full of bruschetta, salsa, and tomato sauce by now, so all Ocotber fruit are sliced and eaten. On BLTs, in omelets, in salads, or just by themselves.

My Sun Golds are still fruiting, also. This was one fantastic year for tomatoes.

What's Blooming Now, May 2016

Late Winter Ritual: The Fedco Order

Though we've had an amazingly warm and hopefully brief winter, I am a bit late with my Fedco tomato seed order this year; or perhaps I am late with it because of our unseasonsable season. It's usually a late January event, that reminds me in the deepest part of winter that warmth will come again, and things will grow.

My husband and I have tried many different hybrid and heirloom tomatoes over the years in our raised beds. Due to our relatively short growing season, some varieties - easpecially those which make very large tomatoes - just don't work out. Regular tomatoes - as opposed to cherry or grape - can have a germination-to-havest time of about 60 - 90 days. I aim for the low end of that range, but I do try to spread the harvest out, so I don't have pounds and pounds of tomatoes all in a two-week window. This year I am going with three tried-and-true varieties, and test-driving one that looked too appealing to resist. Making return appearances this year are:

• Sungolds! Bright yellow-orange cherry tomatoes, on the small side; impossibly sweet, early, prolific: even people who don't like tomatoes like Sungolds. They'll make fruit from the first week in August right up until the frost. Fruit 57 days from germination.
• Oregon Spring. Has one of the briefest growing periods of any full-sized tomato, at 57 days. Good-sized fruit, smooth, and sort of classically tomato-looking. These are nice and flavorful but nothing special; I mostly choose them because if we get a crap summer, as sometimes happens, they will fruit anyway. A pretty good workhorse tomato, they are good sliced or in salsa or sauce. They are my hedge bet. 
• Garden Peach - These are on the small side, pale yellow and slightly fuzzy. Sweet and very juicy. Great to eat sliced or in salsa. They struggle during cold or rainy summers, but produce prolifically if the weather cooperates. 

Sungolds

Oregon Spring

Garden Peach

Jubilee

And my gamble this year :

• Jubilee - an 80-day tomato, orange with 8 oz fruit. If you can't tell, I favor the yellow & orange varieties! I like to have some red, orange, and yellow in my salsa, so pretty with the dark green bits of jalepeno. 80 days...if I plant on Memorial Day, 80 days is...mid-August? Sounds doable, even if it runs late, because September is often our biggest tomato month. 

We alwasy use Fedco, because they are right up the road in Waterville, so they know what will do well in a Maine garden. Time to start saving egg cartons to plant in! And eggshells, which provide calcium for tomato-growing soil.

Woolie Bears Don't Lie

Woolie Bears are the Magic 8-ball of caterpillars. According to folk wisdom, one can predict the coming winter by observing the relative width of the brown band in the woolie bear's middle. When the caterpillars display wider brown bands, the coming season is predicted to be milder. Narrower brown middles conversly predict a harsh winter.

So, what does woolie have to say for himself? Is his middle wide or narrow? He (ze?) has four-ish brown body segments out of thirteen. (No, I can't see thirteen, but that's supposedly how many they have.) According to the (recreational and pretty much unscientific) research by Dr. C. H. Curran, the average is between 5.3 and 5.6 brown segments. So that can't be good.

Last year's woolie bears were pretty short-centered, also, and last year's winter? Was a bitch. In fact I've seen very few woolie bears this year, perhaps as a consequence. The same dynamic that blessed us with very few Japanese beetles to destroy our roses and raspberries has taken most of our woolie bears with the other hand.

As it happens, the caterpillars and the almanac are in agreement, as they were last year: Harsh winter. Our fuzzy little prognosticator says: Outlook not so good.

Dividing Day

My shopping list for today:

• Seep hose
• 50' extension cord
• Mulch

It's the last weekend in September - time to divide the perennials, dig up the neglected beds, and mulch for the winter.

When I started perennial gardening, tumpty-ump years ago in St. Paul Minnesota, I thought I was doing it because it was less work than planting annuals. I like stuff that stays planted! I used to stay. Right? Just plant it and then relax and watch it bloom for years to come.

ROFLMFAO, as we used to say.

In reality, perennial gardening demands composting, weeding, mulching, dividing, and moving plants that are didn't get the memo to bloom where you are planted.

Without attention, by fall, a perennial bed will look kind of like this:

Dry, crowded, weedy. This bed needs to be dug out, the keepers set aside, the weeds pulled, and the dirt mixed with compost and replaced. Either the bed will have to get larger or I will have to discard some plants, because they have all thrived so well they are crowding each other out. I just redid a smaller bed, which now looks like this:

Expanding the bed means even more work next year - and more mulch, which gets expensive. In past I have not had the heart to discard perfectly good plants, so I expand the beds, or start new ones.

Then I started reading The Right Size Flower Garden, by Maine author Kerry Ann Mendez. After some life changes left her with less time and energy to devote to her perennials, Mendez had a choice: let the garden fall into disarray, or limit the garden to the space she could take care of. The book details shrinking beds, planning garden care, and choosing plants that require little attention. I've already started, with two raised bed which were, after many years, too shady for their inhabitants. Pull 'em out, sod 'em over!

Each year, of course, the garden is all about next year's garden: when this finally blooms or that fills in.  This fall I am excited for next year, when I will (hopefully) have time to keep the remaining beds looking sharp all season.

Monarda for Hummingbirds

I've never had any luck with hummingbird feeders. I've tried the fancy-schmancy kind, glass and copper, and the $5 cheapies - recommended by my mother-in-law, the hummingbird queen. What does draw them, however is Monarda. They love the stuff, and who can blame them? Big, intensely red blooms, no maintenance, long bloom season.
There's only one species of hummingbird in Maine, the Ruby-throated, which makes this one a little lady, since she is greenish-gray all over.

Spicebush Swallowtail

...on liatris. #mymainegarden

Baby Hawk Wing Moth

That's how I prefer to think of this ginormous Tomato Horn Worm, happily munching away on Sun Gold foliage. My hubby has created a sort of Hornworm refuge in our one raised bed that is a little too shady to produce much fruit. They are hungry little bastards, but osrt of pretty, as well; and when they finish demolishing plants, they will go away for a while and come back like this:

 

Black-eyed Susan and Sweet WIlliam

 As summer winds down in Maine, my garden starts to look a little ragtag. The daylilies are just brown straws with fading foliage, peonies are long gone and asters yet to come. One bright flower marches straight through from jUly, however: Black-eyed Susan. 

It can be hard to get this plant to "take," it has shallow roots and will die after transplant unless you get a good rootball and water it frequently. Once established, however, it will thrive, even in poor soil. I got to wondering about the name. The Black-Eyed" part is pretty obvious, but is there any special reason why Susan and not Anne or Jennifer or Inez? 

Susan, it turns out, all black-eyed from crying, is the star of an eighteenth century ballard by John Gay, co-starring Sweet William, a popular name for lovelorn fellows in ballards; the famous Barbara Allen scorned her own Sweet William, to her regret. The John Gay ballard begins: 

 ALL in the Downs the fleet was moor’d,

The streamers waving in the wind,

When black-eyed Susan came aboard;

‘O! where shall I my true-love find?

Tell me, ye jovial sailors, tell me true

If my sweet William sails among the crew.’

Another beloved garden flower is named for him: Sweet William the plant blooms about the same time as Black-eyed Susan.  There's only one Sweet William in this house, however:

Here's the whole thing:

Sweet William's Farewell to Black-eyed Susan

ALL in the Downs the fleet was moor’d,
The streamers waving in the wind,
When black-eyed Susan came aboard;
‘O! where shall I my true-love find?
Tell me, ye jovial sailors, tell me true
If my sweet William sails among the crew.’
William, who high upon the yard
Rock’d with the billow to and fro,
Soon as her well-known voice he heard
He sigh’d, and cast his eyes below:
The cord slides swiftly through his glowing hands,
And quick as lightning on the deck he stands.
So the sweet lark, high poised in air,
Shuts close his pinions to his breast
If chance his mate’s shrill call he hear,
And drops at once into her nest:—
The noblest captain in the British fleet
Might envy William’s lip those kisses sweet.
‘O Susan, Susan, lovely dear,
My vows shall ever true remain;
Let me kiss off that falling tear;
We only part to meet again.
Change as ye list, ye winds; my heart shall be
The faithful compass that still points to thee.
‘Believe not what the landmen say
Who tempt with doubts thy constant mind:
They’ll tell thee, sailors, when away,
In every port a mistress find:
Yes, yes, believe them when they tell thee so,
For Thou art present wheresoe’er I go.
‘If to fair India’s coast we sail,
Thy eyes are seen in diamonds bright,
Thy breath is Afric’s spicy gale,
Thy skin is ivory so white.
Thus every beauteous object that I view
Wakes in my soul some charm of lovely Sue.
‘Though battle call me from thy arms
Let not my pretty Susan mourn;
Though cannons roar, yet safe from harms
William shall to his Dear return.
Love turns aside the balls that round me fly,
Lest precious tears should drop from Susan’s eye:
The boatswain gave the dreadful word,
The sails their swelling bosom spread,
No longer must she stay aboard;
They kiss’d, she sigh’d, he hung his head.
Her lessening boat unwilling rows to land;
‘Adieu!’ she cries; and waved her lily hand.

What to do with all those CUKES!

When they come, they come by the dozens! Cucumbers are in season in Maine. Even if you don't have a garden, chances are someone is trying to give you cucumbers. Take them! Great for salads and sandwiches, and now salsa! try this one.

Crisp Cucumber Salsa:


2 cups finely chopped seeded peeled cucumber
1/2 cup finely chopped seeded tomato
... 1/4 cup chopped red onion
2 Tbsp minced fresh parsley
1 jalepeno pepper, seeded and chopped
4-1/2 tsp minced fresh cilantro
1 garlic clove, minced or pressed
1/4 c reduced-fat sour cream
1-1/2 tsp lemon juice
1-1/2 tsp lime juice
1/4 tsp ground cumin
1/4 tsp seasoned salt
Tortilla chips

In a small bowl, combine the first seven ingredients. In another bowl, combine the sour cream, lemon juice, lime juice, cumin and seasoned salt. Pour over cucumber mixture and toss gently to coat. Serve immediately with chips.

Tomatoes and Zucchini, Made for Each Other

Pretty sure it's a sign from God that all of these things are in season at the same time.

1 Medium Tomato
1 Medium Zucchini
1 Medium Summer Squash
1 T snipped garlic greens
1 T snipped chives
3 T olive oil
Salt
Pepper
Parmesan cheese

I chop all the vegetables into 1 to 2 inch chunks, toss everything together, and then place it on some foil. I use enough foil that I can crumple the sides into a makeshift bowl which will then go on the grill. I cover the top with more foil to hold the moisture in, and let the lot steam in its own juice.

I admit, unfashionable as it may be, I like my grilled vegetables cooked; hot-raw just doesn't do it for me. So I put them over a medium-high flame for about 12 -15 minutes. So fresh! I want to take a mental sanpshot of the taste and remember it in January.

Go Ahead and Eat the Daylilies!

July is when I am most satisfied with my garden. Monarda is blooming, brilliant red; also Black-Eyed Susan, Echinachea, and the ubiquitous daylily. I have several different hybrid varieties, but I think my favorite is the classic orange tiger lily, for its exuberant abundance.

I learned something new this season: daylilies are edible! My friend Kim, an artist with Carriage House Arts & Design in Norridgewock, makes daylily jam! You can also sauté the blossoms for a nutritious side dish. Here are a couple of recipes to try.

Daylily Stir Fry (from Spatulatta.com)

A 1 inch piece of ginger root 3 tablespoons of corn oil 1 small can of water chestnuts 2-3 cups daylily buds 1 tablespoon of soy sauce 1 teaspoon of sugar 1 tablespoon of corn starch 3 tablespoons of water

1. Peel and grate ginger.
2. Mix sugar, corn starch and water. Set aside.
3. Warm pan and add the oil. Get the oil quite hot; a haze will appear.
4. Add ginger. Sauté about 30 seconds; don't let it oil brown.
5. Add water chestnuts and daylily buds. Stir fry!
6. Pour the mixture over the lily buds and turn quickly but gently until all the flower buds are coated with a sauce.
7. Serve immediately with rice or as a side dish. 

Or, if you've a sweet tooth, try this Daylily Jam, from Tastebook.com:

• 2 1/2 cups apple juice or white wine
• 4 cups sugar
• 1/4 cup lemon juice
• 3 oz. liquid pectin (Certo-1 pack)
• 1 cup fresh petals or buds. Cut off the stems and take out the stamens and pistils

Bring juice to a boil and pour over petals, cover and steep until liquid has cooked. Strain out petals, leaving only liquid. Combine 2 cups of the flower infusion with the sugar, lemon juice and food coloring. Bring to a boil over high heat. As soon as sugar is dissolved, stir in pectin. Return to a rolling boil stirring and boiling for 1 minute. Remove from heat and skim off foam. Let cool slightly and add more flower petals.Pour into sterilized jars. If flowers don’t stay suspended, stir jelly as it cools until petals stay in place. Process in hot water bath (5 minutes) or seal with paraffin.

Luck Flower, Liver-Friend

In the untended places, chicory is blooming in Maine.

I name it a weed, but of course a weed is only a plant out of its proper place. (Grass, for example, is the most noxious weed in my perennial bed.) Chicory has been cultivated since antiquity for medicinal uses: it was said to be a "friend of the liver" by the Romans and later used to treat insomnia, eye inflammations, and "passions of the heart." A brew of mashed chicory and honey was used topically (and rather optimistically) to make breast round and firm.

Stuff like that always make me wonder: surely someone would have noticed when their breasts sagged no less as a result of smearing on some poultice. And then I think, "Oh, right, confirmation bias:" the same thing that accounts for continued belief in horoscopes and hauntings. (That, and it's more fun than rational thought...)

Chicory is also likely the Luck-Flower of German mythology, which allowed the bearer to cause mountains to open, in which there were always gold and treasures. The hapless fools in the tales always seem to forget or lose their luck-flower on the way out, but that's not chicory's fault. The plant was also believed to confer on the bearer invisibility, if a number of specific conditions were observed during its cutting.

If your liver needs a friend, or you heart contains passions that need healing, try Chicory leaves boiled for five minutes (to remove bitterness), and then sautéed like spinach, with chopped garlic.